Buzz Out Loud Lounge forum: The UK already has Fibre to the home, sort of

Many analysts are always complaining that the UK is falling behind in that it does not have verizon style FIOS, style, FTTH (fibre to the home) services, well i thought this topic needed some clarification. Virgin media's cable network (formerly known as NTL:TELEWEST) is actualy a huge fibre network that is interswitched at various points with the BT network to allow calls to BT landlines, in fact, the little box that virgin installs to give you access to virgin media services in cabled areas is actually a fibre optical terminal, and the cable that is linked to virgin media modems before the modem converts it to ethernet or USB is actually the same type of CO-axial cable used by Verizons riduclously over hyped FIOS service. Secondly, about 20000 homes in the UK were actually linked up to an old FIbre network built by BT in the 198o's when the costs of running a copper network were somehow higher than fibre, this fibre could be turned on to use its "full capacity" to carry massive 100mb internet connections as well as the telephony is already provides, but BT chooses not too, for unknown and undisclosed reasons. Finally , Easynet, a whole sale telco, has sort of found a mid-range between copper and fibre, by using the ethernet protocol on the old Copper phone network currently used for ADSL and somehow, this actually carries up 50mb speeds. The only reason that all these telco's don't harness their fibre like networks to get super high speeds is that their profit margins are higher when they slowly increase, year by year when and ONLY when competition demands that their speeds are increased, than by switching to maximum network capacity overnight. There is no dark fibre in the UK, British dark fibre is a myth, the fibre is just not being used at high speeds for end consumers (unless you can afford the $19000 per year needed for some business high speed symettric up to 1gb lines)