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8:39am on Tuesday, 14th July, 2026:
Anecdote
We're finally getting a fibre-optic Internet conenction down our road. Today is the day they install it in our house.
The village has had fibre-optic for a few years, but not our road: too few people wanted it. We have to use either BT''s ADSL service, which because we're seven miles from the exchange is pitifully slow (but reliable), or an airwaves connection operated by County Broadband, which is fast (but unreliable).
The original plan was for County Broadban to provide a fibre-optic connection that was staggeringly fast, but obtaining permission to dig up the streets delayed the process. During that period, Virgin Internet (which already had a licence from doing other towns) swooped in and installed fibre-optic cables. This put an end to the dreams of County Broadband.
Some time back, BT decided that using copper cables to connect to people's houses was slow and expensive, and got permission from the government to upgrade to fibre-optic. They had previously tried to do this in the 1980s, but the Thatcher government stopped it because rival operators such as Cable & Wireless complained it was unfair competition. We could have had a world-class fibre-optic network for forty years, but by mistaking infrastructure for a service, we didn't.
Anyway, BT Openreach began replacing phone lines with digital connections some time ago, and have eventually reached our road. There are people living in isolated hill farms in Wales that got it before we did.
The installation will be this afternoon between 1pm and 6pm. Openreach asked me to confirm by replying to their text message with CONFIRM. I did this. Then, a few days later, they asked me to confirm by replying YES. I did this. Meanwhile, M Group, which is sub-contracted to do the installation, asked me to confirm by replying Y. I did this. They also asked me to reply Y over WhatsApp. This I did.
BT itself didn't do this. They phoned me, and sent me a text with a code number in it to make sure they were they were speaking to the correct person.
If the installation doesn't work, I can still use County Broadband. If the installer manage to break the County Broadband line, I can still use my phone as a hotspot. I should therefore be able to report back on how it went tomorrow.
I think our landline phone might not work after this, though, so if you're one of the four people who ever uses it, call one of us on our mobile phone instead.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).