The bizarre way that governments spend money

A current commitment from the government is that fibre broadband should reach every house:

UK Budget Speech reaffirms £5bn commitment to full-fibre broadband

But also:

The OneWeb satellite broadband company is back launching again, putting up 36 new satellites on Friday from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Eastern Russia.

The spacecraft are to join the 74 already in orbit.

OneWeb is now owned principally by the Indian conglomerate Bharti Global and the UK government after they bought the enterprise out of bankruptcy this year.

Fifteen more launches of satellites must follow Friday's deployment to complete the internet delivery service.

The government is also spending pots of money on satellite internet delivery. The industry itself is spending billions upon 5G, something which can produce broadband speeds over spectrum rather than fibre. All of which is what makes that fibre broadband pledge such a weird thing to be insisting upon.

It’s possible to argue that all dwellings should, in theory at least, be able to access high speed internet. We don’t agree, as we’ve pointed out before. If individuals living in the boonies don’t think it worth paying the costs to get connected then that means the costs of getting connected aren’t worth it. This is true whether it’s those consumers or us all more generally through tax and government doing the paying.

But put that aside for a moment. We’re in the middle of a vast technological change. What we will be able to do in just two or three years is hugely different from what we can do now. And yet government is insisting upon delivery of the goal using the old technology.

That is, even if the insistence is to be “everyone’s connected at high speed” we shouldn’t be insisting upon fibre being the method just as these new possible methods all come online.

Government picking the method by which something is done is even worse than the mistake of insisting that the thing must be done.