That drags me back 30 years.
I forget who the company was (they eventually ended up as part of Virgin), but they spent ages digging up all the pavements in the area putting in cable. At the time, I had a flat, so a group of us asked the freeholder if we could get connected up. He came back some time later and said no. We assumed that was because he couldn't work out how to make something out of it. I subsequently got talking to a colleague who's girlfriend worked for the company. It turned out that they had spent so much money on digging the road up, that they couldn't afford to make any complicated connections, which we would have been.
Adrian