You are an altnet!

Britian's existing telephone company had fifty years to lay the necessary cables and has still not done so. All you need is a van, an overdraft, and a licence to dig.

Broadband Architect is a management sim about the unglamorous machinery of getting fibre into people's houses: trenching the streets of real British towns, arguing with landowners, boring under rivers, and sizing your network against the one moment that actually matters — the evening peak, when the whole town logs on at once and your backhaul either holds or doesn't.

Real towns built from real map data: actual streets, actual buildings, actual premises counts. Plan routes street by street: tarmac costs more than verge, and the A-road crossing costs more than both. Cabinets, feeders, hubs, backhaul — every home that comes on net is a home you physically reached.

Demand has a shape. At 8 pm the town logs on, and a link that looked comfortable all afternoon goes red. Congestion makes unhappy customers; unhappy customers churn, and churn kills small ISPs. Buy capacity too early, and you are bankrupt; too late and you are bankrupt with a bad reputation.

Raise funding, service the debt, make payroll. Manage crews, installers, and the dispatcher who keeps them moving. Take on contracts and missions, chase vouchers, and watch a rival quietly overbuild the estate you were saving for next quarter. Grow from one town to a national footprint, and outlast every other challenger.

The era ramp is real: demand, technology and tariffs move with the calendar. What counts as a fast connection in 2012 is an embarrassment by 2020, and the kit you bought to win the first town will not win the last one.

British utility-works satire throughout. Hi-vis, tea, rain, roadworks signs, and a proud little company doing a heroic mundane thing.