A place to talk about UK infrastructure. The stuff around us that allows for our lives.
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Yes please! Most of the streets near me have been dug up three or four times now, over the last few years, for new companies to put identical cables next to the other company's cables, because they don't want to pay the rental or whatever it is.
I'm sure the extra telegraph poles are even more annoying.
Funny how the MPs get involved when people are complaining about new utility poles, not when it's going in the ground.
It's made worse by companies not telling anyone what they're up to until the last second.
We had contractors for two altnets digging at the same time at one point.
This is a good site for reading about it too (I think I've seen you post ispreview before, but here it is anyway): https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/09/telecoms-minister-updates-on-effort-to-limit-uk-broadband-poles-via-infrastructure-sharing.html
Kind of surprised that they haven't done what NZ has done and have one company that owns and maintains the physical network then sells access to ISP's. The company installs fiber to your house and terminates the fiber in an ONT (a box that converts from fiber to ethernet) that any ISP can connect to (or multiple ISP's depending on the ONT).
That way you have a choice of providers and there isn't multiple fiber installs being done.
Right now I get an uncapped, no contract 300down/100up for about £45 and if I wanted to I could bump it up to 950down/500up for another £10 a month (before any bundling discounts).
The speed is pretty consistent & often slightly over and I get a choice of router that I want to use (currently a MikroTik RB960PGS).
And I just looked it up and 2/4/8 gigabyte symmetric plans are being rolled out as they upgrade the cabinets and they aren't much more expensive.
There is a network that was built using taxpayer money (Openreach) and they’re required to lease it out to other ISPs. However, other companies are free to build their own and only use parts of the Openreach network. Virgin Media (formerly NTL) have built their own network but most other companies only build own small sections here and there and plug into Openreach for the rest, but Virgin don’t lease their network out. So you’re basically using Openreach or Virgin Media.