...and you still can in a relatively small number of locations, mostly 'urban'. Since your 'time' HMG were 'persuaded' by the monopolistic BT to give them all the public money to enable "95% of UK properties" to have 'slow' speed broadband down the copper/aluminium landlines (owned, as luck would have it, by BT) fed from fibre cabinets (owned by BT...) by 2017.
You are still 'stuffed' in many many parts of the UK with poor or no mobile (2G) signals and no cable.