The UK government has set out a package of measures to accelerate nationwide build-out of fiber and 5G, with the aim of bringing gigabit fiber-to-the-home to a majority of households, while also providing the backhaul grid for 5G. However, there are risks in this plan, and the UK would do well to learn lessons from the disasters of the government-run national broadband network (nbn) project in Australia. The Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review was published late last month by the UK government, as part of the wider Industrial Strategy. The UK is well behind several European counterparts in terms of fiber broadband, which currently reaches only 4% of homes (compared to 71% in Spain, 89% in Portugal and 28% in France). The…