Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirius
Please stop its making me split my sides 
BT have had no choice or there broadband would stay in the dark ages. What they are about to offer is nothing new to be honest, Cable have been doing fibre to the local cab for ages. All Bt are doing is copying what cable have already done, Most of what BT is doing is fibre to the cab, with the last km in copper. However i feel VM has a few things up its sleeves, 
BTW i have designed and implemented over 30 km of fibre in one town alone in the northwest in the last 3 months for VM Business, That's in and carrying traffic, Fibre is nothing new to vm. |
This comment just goes to show how good the hamstringing was when the GPO was segmented and privatised.
You will find, if you look, that BT (or previously the GPO) played a much bigger part in the research and development of the miniscule amount of the technology that you have spent 3 months installing, and continue to do so. VM just use it.
Goes back years
"Newman, looking to solve the problems with Robinson, was put in touch with
Tommy Flowers, a talented electronics engineer working for the Post Office at Dollis Hill.
Tommy Flowers’ design solved the problems of Robinson in an innovative way. Rather than using paper tape to store the pseudorandom sequence, Flowers replicated it electronically using a huge array of valves. This saved using two tapes and solved the synchronisation problems. The use of valves for digital switching was also a groundbreaking step which offered a huge increase in operating speed over mechanical relays (valves at the time were regarded by most as unreliable components used for amplifying analog signals.)
Design of Colossus started in March 1943 and the first unit was operational at Bletchley Park in January 1944. Colossus was immediately successful, and the Colossus – Tunny combination allowed ‘high grade’ German codes to be decoded in hours. This proved immensely useful during the D-Day landings. The parallel design of Colossus made it incredibly fast even by today’s standards,
a modern Pentium PC programmed to do the same decoding task taking twice as long to break the code."
The GPO as was and BT as is continue to lead the way in R&D but are still hamstrung by successive governments.
2004
BT is begin limited trials of fibre-to-the-home to assess its technical and commercial viability.
Up to 1,500 homes and businesses in Martlesham Heath in Suffolk, Milton Keynes and London's Docklands are to have fibre lines up and running in October.
New fibre optic cables are to be installed between BT exchanges and the properties of those taking part in the year-long trial.
See also
Significant research efforts and early manufacturing investments
came from many UK-based companies including Standard Telephones
and Cables (STC – now Nortel Networks), British Telecom (BT), Plessey
and GEC in the 1980s.
The early development of the fibre-optics
industry owed much to BT, which pioneered the development of
modern “singlemode” fibre optics in the 1970s, and R&D support
programmes from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) nurtured
the industry’s growth.
Source
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.g.../file26390.pdf