ation networks that will allow us to work rest and play at a new level of efficiency and intensity, assuming that this is want we want or need to do. The release of the Digital Britain4 report in 2009 by the UK government articulated the ambition but was nonspecific on where the funding would be found. 12.6.1 Historical Precedents - Return on Infrastructure Investment Time Scales There are many past examples where infrastructure investment has been considered as critical to achieving economic, social and political progress. 4 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/broadcasting/5631.aspx/. Making Telecoms Work When technology innovation has coincided with an ability to raise capital and an appetite for risk then the change can be dizzyingly fast. The canals and railways of Victorian Britain were an extreme example. Over the next one hundred and fifty years, telegraphy, telephony and telecommunications grew out of a similar mix of invention combined with private and public investment. The return on that investment can be very long term. Passenger numbers on the railways for example are presently increasing in the UK. Most train journeys cross a nineteenth-century bridge or embankment. Investment benefit time scales of this order are difficult to reconcile with conventional investment horizons. Railway planning is best done over thirty- to fifty-year time scales and telecommunications should arguably be the same. Conveniently thirty to fifty years is coincident with the average working and earning life span, a fact that makes or should make infrastructure investment interesting and relevant to pension-fund investors. Australian pension funds have embraced this opportunity with some enthusiasm but most other countries remain focused on shorter-term returns. 12.7 Telecommunications and Economic Theory Economic theory when applied to telecommunications unearths other puzzling contradictions and apparently underexploited opportunities. For example, it could be argued that speed 