It looks like we might finally start to see Fibre To The  Home (FTTH) in the UK, looking at reports here. BT have got their way, and OFCOM will not regulate the wholesale price they charge competitors for access to their network. Depending on how the retail pricing turns out, this could be a problem. Competition obviously drives prices down, and this makes it a lot harder for the smaller ISPs to enter the market.

FTTH can theoretically deliver incredibly fast speeds (this is aiming at 100 mb/s, but 1,000mb/s instead of 8mb/s anyone?), but there is the question about what this would actually be used for. It’s one of those situations where looking at amplifying current usage patterns is not the answer – you’re not going to get people surfing the web at 1,000mb/s, you’re not going to need it to read your e-mail, you’re not going to need it to for nearly any of the things the average man in the street uses the internet for. The usage for this kind of bandwidth is going to be a major culture shift in the way entertainment (and possibly technology) functions in the home. The quality of tools like the iPlayer and YouTube suddenly are able to be upgraded; video communication suddenly becomes less about jerky out of sync video, and becomes more like talking to someone across the room; online gaming lag is elimenated; working from home suddenly sees no lag compared to working in the office.

The broader possibilites comes from the last couple of examples there, and come under the heading of cloud computing or infrastructure as a service. Rather than having a fully featured computer in your home/business, you could have a dumb terminal which would allow you purely to connect to the service. Once connected, you could then draw on the central resources depending on what tasks you need to do at the time. So when you’re only surfing the net, you only pay for that capability, but if you need to ramp up to play an intensive game you draw more of the central resource. I think it’s an interesting concept, but it’s a complete move away from the way these sort of arrangements normally work. Pretty much anything which is eventually displayed in your home could be moved into this – games, movies, music, telephone, etc.

Going back to the first paragraph, the worrying part may be the domination of the market by BT. This could slow down adoption, and extend the time it takes for the above services to become truly viable. There is definitely an argument that this kind of capital investment is best driven by government. The alternative is could result in a large amount of duplication and local monopolization. Of course, it might not, and I may be pleasantly surprised…