A very impressive effort from 1969, despite getting off to an unpromising start with thinking that the future of phones lay in video phones – that perennial prediction for the next big thing that kept on turning out to be misplaced time after time as other more important and more popular innovations took off instead:
The film features the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill which was also where Bletchley Park’s famous code-breaking computer, the Colossus, was built.
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I've seen this before. Love the way the film maker shows the disadvantages of the technology the GPO is promoting! Doubt any publicity manager would allow that now. Nor would the opening shot in a promotional film feature a businessman calling his mistress! Their scheme for cabling up an estate is roughly what the cable companies did 20 years later. I don't think it could have been done in 1969, because while coax cable was fast enough for an estate, there was no economic way to handle the massive long distance traffic that would result. The solution would require two critical STL inventions - PCM (which they mention) and optical fibre transmission, which they did not. Two years later, STL demonstrated 75 Mbits/sec transmission at the 1971 Physics Exhibition, (I built part of the electronics for that demo), and in 1977 STC supplied the 140 Mbits/sec field trial with the BBC and the GPO (as they still were then). See also http://www.stlqcc.org.uk/docs/milestones.htm.
Interesting that they called it wideband - pretty close to broadband - and the prediction of computers allowing working from home.
I was just interested in the assumption that you would be able tobuy a house for £3,500!
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