Assuming that the country can only afford one large infrastructure project (although both would be great!), I wish that instead of spending £30bn on HS2, the Government instead spent it on funding a 100% rollout of FTTP by collaborating with BT Openreach in a similar arrangement to the aborted NBN rollout in Australia. I reckon that could be achieved in 15 years, including the installation of Optical Network Terminals in each premises. I'm sure that those residents who have their ONTs installed first will query why they have to wait 14 years for it to be used, but the Government would have to explain that their great-great-great-grandparents in the early 20th Century would have expressed similar concerns when telephone lines and plumbing were being installed in their houses - which today's generation now takes for granted as essential utilities. Even 50 years ago, some people didn't have running water and had to use an outdoor toilet and use a mangle for their washing.
Currently, the maximum speed of Google Fiber in the US is 1Gbps down / 1Gbps up for $70 p/m. However, they provide a service for free at 5Mbps down (i.e. 5% of the maximum) / 1Mbps up, so long as a $300 construction fee is paid, either one-off or at $25p/m for 12 months. Disregarding the cost of the router, an 8-port gigabit switch is around £25 and an 8-port 10GBASE-T switch around £500. CFO Patrick Pichette has already said that a 0Gbps symmetrical ought to be rolled out in 2017. This will hopefully drive down the cost of the dearer switch to that of the cheaper one. If we work on the basis that Google also increase the bandwidth of their free service by a factor of 10 then that will be 50Mbps down / 10Mbps up. From what I understand, Google currently use a WDM-PON/G-PON hybrid so presumably they will continue with this topology. I understand that the next steps for the latter technology are 10G-PON, 40G-PON and 100G-PON.
By 2030, I'd like to see 100Gbps symmetrical as the fastest service available in the UK and 10Gbps symmetrical as the free service (it's fair to assume that Google will offer the same by then). A one-off £300 construction fee is cheaper than the yearly £150 that people currently pay for landline rental. A 100GBASE-T switch will be the same £25 as a gigabit switch is now. By then, the successor to HEVC / H.265 (let's call it H.266) could be implemented into £50 STBs, which will be ideal for 8K / Super Hi-Vision Broadcasting. It will have been 20 years since people had to last spend £25 on an MPEG-2 STB for Digital Switch Over so they won't complain about the expenditure, and a 10Gbps guaranteed uplink speed will be fine for cloud DVR functionality. Therefore, similar to what was proposed by the House of Lords a couple of years ago, the UK's entire TV and radio broadcasting could immediately be switched from OTA to IPTV, which would instantly free up TONS of spectrum for mobile data ('6G' by then), and if that had been auctioned five years prior (i.e. 10 years from now) then it could be switched on at once.
The stated rationale for HS2 is to increase rail capacity, not speed (as people in this thread have said, it is debatable whether the current lines and rail technology are being used to their full potential, and it is said that the distances between cities in the UK are too small for maglev, let alone Hyperloop, to reach full speed and therefore be cost-effective), yet ensuring that the South of England has a direct rail route to the North of England so that the latter can compete economically with the former. The Government encourage people to travel on public transport, but the reason that people travel by train rather than coach is that it is faster than even car. However, we are approaching the 50th anniversary of the 70MPH speed limit. In that time, cars have become far safer and more reliable. By 2030, self-driving electric cars will be available for under £10,000. Therefore, given that the majority of road accidents occur at low speeds, surely the speed limit could be increased to 100MPH+ on motorways?
Once the problem of poor yields has been solved, I understand that OLED TVs will be cheaper to produce than LCD TVs. Imagine a 150" 8K OLED display. Microsoft will have their fifth-generation Kinect out by then. Cisco Telepresence will have improved. Oculus Rift will probably be on the 15th iteration of their VR headset. Will businesspeople still need to physically commute as frequently in 2030, 2040, 2050 anyway?
