Fibre optic to the door for business and everybody.

Will never happen without nationalisation.

Private companies are not interested, they just want the rich pickings they are a cartel.

Already underway elsewhere just has to be done to even keep up.

British broadband, an asset on the UK balance sheet, not chinese.

We need to vote this council out.
They want to build 40.000 homes in croydon!!!

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Surely a better solution to providing wi-fi to people who need it would be to make corperations pay for the internet access that they get for free from people that are increasingly encouraged to work from home. That could also extend to the cost of devices like smartphones where people are encoraged to user their own hardware to run corporate software. They could at least provide an allowance for this. The cost saving for corporation are huge compared to providing more permanent desk space.

Surely a better solution to providing wi-fi to people who need it would be to make corperations pay for the internet access that they get for free from people that are increasingly encouraged to work from home. That could also extend to the cost of devices like smartphones where people are encoraged to user their own hardware to run corporate software. They could at least provide an allowance for this. The cost saving for corporation are huge compared to providing more permanent desk space.

Well collectively the spending plans are certainly crazy.

However, I regard broadband coverage and speeds as vital first world infrastructure.....So I won't criticise that.

Sorry I'm not sure how this then pays for fibre to be installed to every household in the UK.

If you mean the money paid by corporations gets funnelled into a fund that then pays for the network to be upgraded to every home, then I suppose that could work. Although I'd be interested to know the percentage of people that work from home more than 3 days a week, which would probably be the qualifier to get free or subsidised internet and or devices. Most medium to large corporates supply free of subsidised mobile hardware and data to their employees anyway so that is nothing new. You'd also have a hard time convincing SMEs to sign up to this as it would hammer their growth potential.

Not every business operates in a way that supports WFH en masse. The zenith of this approach has already been and gone – there are extensive studies around frequent WFH actually being a negative rather than a positive, for fairly obvious reasons.

The irony here is that it's the same socialist approach, just implemented in a less workable way.

Spending 80bn on free fibre broadband to everyone is mental. Spending 15bn ensuring everyone has the potential to access fibre is more sensible. If you wanted to go further on reducing price for people there then make it means tested, although that comes with an admin nightmare.

And to those saying 'Just spend it all on 5G' – the phone companies already do this, just not to low priority areas. Or not for a long time after it's been turned on in cities. Add additional 5G infrastructure on top of that 15bn fibre everywhere plan. You need a mix of both as it's going to be a while until as a society we are able to become fully reliant on currently unstable, and low bandwidth (when compared with wired connections) wireless data transfer.

Additional funding to close the gap on Fibre + 5G installation would be expensive, but more practical than Labours free internet plan and nowhere near 80bn. Ideologically it's sound, i.e. internet access is increasingly becoming close to an essential human right, but financially it just doesn't make sense.

Edited by SW19 CPFC (15 Nov 2019 4.41pm)