TELLYHOUSE, Cable and Witless, Tuesday (NTN) — TalkTalk and BSkyB are building their own fibre network in York to deliver the most unreliable, limited and filtered Internet service seen in Britain to date.

TalkTalk chief Dido Harding said: “We are going to deliver a pure fibre network that will deliver speeds of 1 gigabit per second direct to homes and businesses in York … within the fair use bandwidth allowance, and duly filtered against rudeness, unpleasantness and copyright violations.”

The “state of the art” network will have superfast connections to tens of thousands of homes and businesses, with full clear speed guaranteed by not actually letting people see anything they want to. Filters against porn, health information, gays, music, telly, unpleasantness, Wikipedia and gays will be on by default — though any customer will be able to opt out by putting an advertisement in their local newspaper announcing “I AM A FILTHY WHOREMONGER” for thirty days.

Virgin Media are not standing still. Computers on a Virgin cable connection will issue an electric shock through the keyboard whenever a customer attempts to access a filtered site. The company will automatically forward the customer’s address to the Internet Watch Foundation and the British Phonographic Institute.

TalkTalk customers frequently express outrage at the Internet provider’s censorship mechanisms, though not enough outrage to actually pay a penny more to go somewhere else.