Comms

I have always been fascinated by computer communications: both between them and peripherals, and between computers, both in terms of the hardware and software required.

Computer terminals have always needed to talk across tens of metres to their servers or their mainframes, depending on your definition, and across the miles to join cities and countries, amnd the drive has always been "more speed/more capacity".
Local data connection standards started for me with soldering up RS-232 serial leads in various configurations for modems and printers, continued with parallel, PS/2, CGA, EGA, VGA and finally USB and USB-C, HDMI and Bluetooth. All faster, more useful and more fault-tolerant than the last.
Inter-computer local connection standards began with RS-232 and RS-422, moved to Token Ring and then Ethernet which has lasted surprisingly well, abeit via switches as opposed to hubs.

Long distance data connection standards began, of course, back in the 19th Century with the telegraph over copper cables runing Morse code (early digital, you see), initially hand-keyed and hand-deciphered, then machine-transmitted and decoded (you can still hear high-speed morse if you listen carefully on some AM radio frequencies).
As an aside, read your way through the Terry Pratchett Discworld novels; the Clacks system is a non-magical communications system using semaphore signalling, but developed through various novels into a system capable of transmitting raster-scaned colour pictures. Only Pratchett could devise this....

The need for increased capacity led to the international X.25 circuit-switched leased line transmission standard in 1976, allowing high-speed intercontinental data communications. But separately the idea of packet data switching, allowing vastly increased capacity and better control gained popularity and eventually TCP/IP was mde to run over X.25, making X.25 just the transport layer and allowing the seamless worldwide Internet access we now have.
Fibre-optic cables replaced copper in the 1980s, allowing hugely greater capacity over international routes such as The Atlantic.

Back in the 1990s Demon Internet was the first UK company to offer dial-up access purely to the Internet, without additional wrapping, swiftly followed by Freeserve and reluctantly by BT who persisted with the whole wrapping thing for many years.
Copper for long-distance overland transmission was replaced by fibre optic cables in all major access routes during the 1980s and 1990s. The massive increase in available capacity led to unused circuits being known as "dark fibre".
But local access to this high-capacity network has been jealously-guarded by the telecomms companies who have artificially maintained very high access costs by slowing the roll out of local fibre.
Rural communities in the UK have long been starved of high speed Internet and even now that OfCom have forced Openreach to finally do the installs, their local FTTP access circuits only officially offer data access speeds of around 80-200Mbit. The fibres are capable of 10GBit and in the hands of a competent ISP like Gigaclear these higher-speed services are available at sensible prices.
OfCom have done what they can, and services like B4RN, Gigaclear and Wessex Internet all offer much higher speeds in competition with Openreach so hopefully forcing Openreach to raise their game and offer these higher speeds not at a premium price.
It's not the first time BT have dragged their heels over rural broadband: the initial roll out of ADSL in the early-2000s was strictly restricted to areas where Virgin Media had already rolled out co-ax based networks. This was apparently a "commerical" decision, although quite how overbuilding networks can be justified eludes me.
To circumvent their refusal to upgrade us we ended up running a high-speed wireless network covering three villages and a business park. WISP Broadband did excellent business and provided sparkling broadband well in to the 2000's. I spent a lot of time up ladders and in router cabinets, and learned a lot.
Many rural areas did not receive any ADSL service until well in to the 2010s and VDSL upgrades to those networks in many cases have only happened where a 3rd party provider such as Gigaclear have already laid cables. The ludicrous decision not to put VDSL on to Exchange Only Lines (EOL) has only delayed things further.
Satellite-based Internet provision was once the Great White Hope but a combination of high charges and extremely high latency  due to the distance the signal needs to travel made it unusable.... until Starlink came along.
Like many industries he gets involved with, Elon Musk likes to disrupt, and Starlink has the potential to seriously upset rural broadband providers' commercial models. Starlink is good enough to use, not hugely expensive and the latency is low. Watch this space....

Our experience of the new "Altnets": Gigaclear and Wessex Internet has been that they are extremely good and very efficient once rolled out. Gigaclear's rollouts have been chaotic and poorly-planned, whereas Wessex's rollouts have been fast, efficient and well-planned, if somehwat lacking in information disbursed along the way. But the results are fantastic: everything from browsing and e-mail, VPN links to video streaming just works properly. Wessex's services are symmetric (as all services should be) and scalable.

Staggeringly, on specifiying a couple of post-retirement Internet services for relatives in central Oxford and Didcot during 2025 I discovered that FTTP was *still* not available in central Headington. I'm unsure what Openreach think they are doing but "men leaning on spades" comes to mind. In the middle of what the Government thinks is a Tech Hub Town the only Internet connection available is 1960's copper. What on Earth is going on? Virgin, where are you? CityFibre, where are you? It's 2025, not 1987 you know...