Broadband Architect

You are an altnet. Britain's telephone company had fifty years to put the cables in and has still not done it. You have 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 the network against the one moment that matters — the evening peak, when the whole town logs on at once and your backhaul either holds or doesn't.

Real towns from real map data — actual streets, actual buildings, actual premises counts. Route the duct street by street: tarmac costs more than verge, the A-road crossing costs more than both, and a wood is a shape on the board you go round or pay for. 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; 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. Crews, installers, and the dispatcher who keeps them moving. Chase vouchers, take tenders, 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.

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.

Hi-vis, tea, rain, roadworks signs, and a proud little company doing a heroic mundane thing.