You might find the crossover for hot water heating is higher than 0p; your boiler is likely only around 70% efficient. So at 6p/therm for gas, you'd break even with resistive electric heating at around the 10p/kWh mark.
You should absolutely re-run these numbers to be sure, but you might find you can use electric heating far more often than you might currently be doing.
> If it makes you more money to be available 24/7 then why wouldn't you?
Agreed, but for a government service where you update your license, or tell them about selling a car or something, there's no real 'more' money. Being closed at 3am doesn't lose the opportunity in the way that it would if you were selling widgets. It instead forces the would-be users at 3am to wait until the morning.
It'd have likely been the equipment in the street. That said, in Winter, you can overload this a bit. After all the failure mode would be the wires getting so hot they begin to melt.
If you know they're covered in ice, or are currently being rained on in near-freezing air temperatures, you can push more current than they'd be able to at 2pm on a hot summer's day.
I mean, the UK has 20+ fibre links to other lands. If one goes down, fine, if a second goes down, it's suspicious. If a third goes down, and there are Russian ships milling about over the location of the.. yes, there goes a fourth, it doesn't take long to realise what's going on.
Now, what the British Navy would do about this I'm not precisely sure. But even to escort the ships away would put a stop to it, and the UK wouldn't be cut off.
If & only if Facebook sell access to capacity on the cable publically (They might just keep it for their internal use), and then if any of the providers that the gaming traffic uses start to use capacity on that cable.
However, fundamentally, even if fibre took the most direct route from your house, directly straight-line to the datacentre with the server in, and then straightline from there to your friends on the East Coast, the time taken to complete that journey and back is still going to be 150-200msec or so; so it won't be as snappy as if you all lived nearby, sadly.
Your challenge is getting every ISP to accept this. The routing table might fit in the RAM of a typical server, but perhaps not so easily in the RAM of many routers still deployed in the field.
It's a nice idea, but sadly it'll lose out to commercial realities in many cases.