Monday June 15th is D-day in the UK – the day we start to emerge from Lock Down. While some have continued to work throughout and others started earlier Jun 15th is the day the emphasis changes. Gone is the focus on stay at home to be replaced by stay safe. Masks must be worn on public transport as passenger numbers increase. This new world will feel strange and different. No more talk of foreign holidays while grannies appear dressed to rob the local post office.

Much of what we learnt in lock down is here to stay with the biggest change being the move on-line. Be it entertainment, working from home, video conferencing or on-line shopping those two insanely fine copper wires that bring the World Wide Web to your door are now more important than ever.

With this in mind is it not time to give them the status and respect they deserve? For many the first thing to do is upgrade to a fibre connection – this improves the speed of your connection allowing everyone in your home access to web. Openreach are alert to this shift and are ramping up the roll out of full fibre. This upgrade increases your connection speed 10 fold and removes reliance on those two thin copper strands – a step in the right direction.

Swapping you connection to fibre is expensive and Openreach are not doing this just to give you a better service. They are acutely aware that if they do not improve their service they will be left behind with the roll out of 5G, which can simply replace the wired connection with a superfast wireless alternative.

Whichever way you decide to go, those two copper wires that first connected you great grandparents to their local telephone exchange are reaching the end of their natural lives as our experience in lock-down has changed the way we live forever.