Milton Keynes did seem to have telecoms problems for a long time, some areas still do.
Initially, when building first started about 50 years ago, a BT owned and operated cable TV system was installed that by the 1990s was one of the most comprehensive in the country. The cables were almost exclusively installed underground, sharing ducts into each home with telephone cables.
Unfortunately, development and upgrading of the TV network seemed to stop in the 1990s / early 2000s and eventually BT were forced to sell off their cable TV networks around the country, (ISTR it was connected with BT starting up BT Vision or BT TV). Virgin Media bought the Milton Keynes Cable TV system, early in the 2010's but later decided it was uneconomic to upgrade the old coax's to fibre cables - I did hear that they couldn't reach a financial agreement with BT / Openreach to use the existing ducts for VM's fibres. Virgin Media shut down the cable TV system entirely in the middle of the last decade. AFAIK, no parts of Milton Keynes are served by VM's "proper" cable system with high speed internet etc - and never have been?
The way that BT, (before Openreach existed), planned the telephone cable duct routes seems to follow how estates were built: for example, I am approximately 400 metres by walking distance from the cabinet that used to serve our house, (later changed - long story), but an Openreach engineer once showed me his tester which indicated a cable route to the cab of approx 800 metres! I later saw a cable diagram that showed a very twisty duct route to get to our part of the estate.
Another issue that is common to many areas of Milton Keynes, bearing in mind that there was a lot of house building here in the 1970's an 80's was the use of aluminium cable - fine for telephony, awful for broadband!
CityFibre have been building around here for at least 4 years, and I think that Openreach are building in other parts of the city, but no plans for our immediate area AFAIK.
