Who Killed Optical Fiber? Dreams of the Information Highway
The MIT Press eBooks · 2024
Every so often, a story does the rounds on British social media of "how Thatcher killed the UK's superfast broadband before it even existed." 1 Originating from an article on TechRadar in 2014, the story is told through an interview with Peter Cochrane, BT's chief technology officer from April 1999 to November 2000.The article begins "in the 70s when Dr Cochrane was working as BT's Chief Technology Officer," although Cochrane was actually a research engineer at the Post Office's research center in Suffolk at this time.2The story, as TechRadar and Cochrane tell it, is that through the 1980s BT began a massive rollout of optical fiber across the country but, in 1990, the Thatcher government decided that this was "anti-competitive" and so BT had to stop.This, Cochrane argues, is why the UK lags behind South Korea, Japan, and much of Europe in rolling out fiber-optic cables to consumers' homes.In reality, this story is more complex than a single decision made by Margaret Thatcher in 1990.The Post Office and BT had been searching for high-bandwidth transmission technologies that would meet the UK's information needs since the late 1960s, when the telecom business first formulated the plan for a nationwide, integrated digital network that could provide voice, data, and video services to customers.It was the long techno-political history of that search that shaped the rollout of optical fiber in the UK, and not a single political decision made in 1990.This chapter is about that search.It looks at the transmission mediamicrowaves, coaxial cables, and optical fiber-that telecom engineers thought could provide the UK with the necessary bandwidth for an information society.This is a history of frustration and anticipation.Engineers and