(also known as '''British Telecommunications plc''') which trades as '''BT''' (and previously as '''British Telecom''') is the
Privatised UK state
Telecommunications operator. It is the dominant fixed line telecommunications provider in the United Kingdom.
BT works in more than 170 countries and approaching a third of its revenue now comes from its Global Services division.
BT owns and runs the
Telephone Exchange s, trunk network and
Local Loop connections for the vast majority of British fixed-line telephones. Currently BT is responsible for approximately 25 million telephone lines in the UK. Apart from Kingston Communications who serve Kingston-upon-Hull, BT are the only UK telecoms operator to have a ''Universal Service Obligation'' (USO) which means it must provide a fixed telephone line to any address in the UK. It is also obliged to provide public call boxes.
It is officially designated the dominant operator in British telecommunications market. BT's businesses are operated under special government regulation by the British telecoms regulator
Ofcom (formerly
Oftel ).
BT Group is organised into five business divisions:
- ''BT Retail'': Retail telecoms to consumers
- ''BT Wholesale'': Wholesale telecoms core trunk network
- ''Openreach'': fenced-off wholesale division, tasked with ensuring that all rival operators have equality of access to BT's own local network
- ''BT Global Services'': Business services and solutions (formerly ''BT Ignite'' and '' BT Syntegra '')
- ''BT Exact / One IT'': Research and Development, and consultancy.
Official BT history page
A number of privately owned
Telegraph companies operated in Britain from
1846 onwards. Among them were
With the invention of the
Telephone by
Alexander Graham Bell in
1876 the GPO began to provide telephone services from some of its telegraph exchanges. However in
1882 the
Postmaster-General , Henry Fawcett started to issue licences to operate a telephone service to private businesses and the telephone system grew under the GPO in some areas and private ownership in others. The GPO's main competitor the
National Telephone Company emerged in this market by absorbing other private telephone companies, prior to its absorption into the GPO in
1912 .
The trunk network was unified under GPO control in
1896 and the local distribution network in
1912 . A few municipally owned services remained outside of GPO control. These were
Kingston Upon Hull ,
Portsmouth and
Guernsey . Hull still retains an independent operator,
Kingston Communications , though it is no longer municipally controlled.
In
1969 the GPO, a government department, became
The Post Office , a nationalised industry separate from government. Post Office Telecommunications was one of the divisions.
On
1 October ,
1981 Post Office Telecommunications was renamed and became a state-owned corporation independent of the Post Office. In
1982 BT's monopoly on telecommunications was broken, with the grant of a licence to
Mercury Communications .
The privatisation took place in
1984 , with the sale of 51% of the shares in the company (incorporated in 1984 as ''British Telecommunications plc'') to the public in November.
The company changed its trading name to 'BT' in
March 31 ,
1991 . The remaining state holdings in the company were sold in
1991 and
1993 .
In the 1990s, BT entered the Irish
Telecommunications market through a joint venture with the
Electricity Supply Board , the Irish state owned power provider. This venture, entitled , found its main success through the launch of Ireland's first subscription-free dial-up ISP, oceanfree.net. As a telecoms company it found much less success, mainly targeting corporate customers. BT acquired 100% of this venture in 1999.
In in April 2005. Esat Digifone became part of BT Wireless. EsatBT installed the first
DSL lines in Ireland, and operate one exchange, in
Limerick .
In June
1994 BT and
MCI launched
Concert Communications Services which was a $1 billion joint venture between the two companies. Its aim was to build a network which would provide easy global connectivity to multinational corporations.
This alliance progressed further on
3 November 1996 when the two companies announcement that they had entered into a full merger agreement to create a global telecommunications company to be called Concert plc, which would be incorporated in the UK with headquarters in both London and Washington DC. This would have given BT an entry into the US market and MCI a global reach. The merger proposition gained approval from the
European Commission , the
US Department Of Justice and the
US Federal Communications Commission and looked set to proceed. However on
1 October 1997 Worldcom made a rival bid for MCI which was followed by a counter bid from
GTE . MCI accepted the Worldcom bid and BT pulled out of its deal with a generous severance fee of $465 million. BT made even more money when it sold its stake in MCI to Worldcom in
1998 for £4,159 million on which it made an exceptional pre-tax profit of £1,133 million. It also avoided being mired in the later Worldcom scandal.
BT also bought from MCI its 24.9 per cent interest in Concert Communications making Concert a wholly owned part of BT.
BT then later had a dalliance with
AT&T as a possible alternative global partner but nothing came of this.
In June 2001 BT's directory business was demerged as
Yell Group .
A larger demerger followed in November of the same year, when the former mobile telecommunications business of BT, BT Cellnet, was hived off as a separate business named "
MmO2 ". This included BT owned or operated networks in other countries, including BT Cellnet (UK), Esat Digifone (Ireland), and Viag Interkom (Germany). All networks now owned or operated by mmO
2 (except
Manx Telecom ) were renamed as O
2.
This was a move designed to remove the burden of debt with which the company had encumbered itself, much of which was acquired during the bidding round for the
3rd Generation Mobile Telephony (commonly known as
3G ) licenses. The de-merger was accomplished via a share-swap, all British Telecommunications plc shareholders received 1 mmO
2 plc and 1 BT Group plc (of which British Telecommunications is now a wholly owned subsidiary) share for each share they owned. British Telecommunications plc was de-listed on
16 November 2001 and the two new companies started trading on
19 November . mmO
2 plc was replaced by
O2 Plc in a further share-swap in
2005 .
In April
2003 , BT launched its new corporate identity. The "BT" logotype from 1991 was retained, but the piper was replaced by a "connected world". Esat BT retained the piper for nearly two years after it was dropped by its parent.
Oftel 's strategy for telecoms deregulation in the UK through the 1990s was to drive down BT's market share. It aimed to achieve this by restrictions on the size of its price increases and by forcing it to allow other telcos to gain access to the connection between the exchange and the customers premises.
This has been successful in the area of telephony resale through Independent Service Providers (ISPs) but has left BT as the dominant operator in
ADSL connections and local loop provision.
In
2003 BT resumed its participation in the UK mobile market with the launch of BT Mobile. The company denies the move is a U-turn, describing the sell-off of mmO2 as the best move for shareholders and investors. BT wishes to reach younger consumers who use BT's fixed line services less than previous generations. BT Mobile is a reseller of mobile services supplied by the UK's mobile operators and no longer owns a mobile network.
BT has also re-entered the market for hardcopy telephone directories, an offering which it curiously classifies as 'New Wave'.
''Openreach'' was announced in September
2005 at the instigation of
Ofcom to provide an open and equal service of provision and repair in the "last mile" of copper wire. This business was formed from 25,000 engineers previously employed by BTs Retail and Wholesale divisions. It is designed to ensure that other Independent telephone service providers (ISPs) have exactly the same operational conditions as parts of the BT group. It opened for business on 11 Jan
2006 .
More recently BT has acquired Italy's second largest operator,
Albacom , providing BT with another major network outside the UK. In February 2005 the Infonet acquisition was a fact, giving BT entry into geographies it had no presence yet. In April 2005, it bought
Radianz (now rebranded as
BTRadianz ), which expanded BT's coverage, provided BT with more buying power in certain countries and importantly gave access to the financial markets.
BT Broadband is an
ADSL ISP in the United Kingdom, operating under the BT Retail division of BT Group PLC. There are currently four different packages, pricing is based on usage guidelines. All packages have are subject to a 12 month minimum contract and provide an 'up to' 8Mbit/s downstream speed. They are as follows:
- Option 1 - £14.99/month - 2 GB usage guideline
- Option 2 - £20.99/month - 6 GB usage guideline
- Option 3 - £24.99/month - 20 GB usage guideline
- Option 4 - £29.99/month - 40 GB usage guideline
BT Broadband uses the BT CentralPlus scheme, and so are unable to offer static IP addresses.
BT Business Broadband also offers broadband internet products to businesses in the United Kingdom. They offer various packages, ranging from 500 Kbit/s to 2 Mbit/s, with the more expensive plans offering extra features or more advanced hardware. The packages are as follows (prices exclusive of
VAT ):
- Lite - £19.99/month (until 30 June 2006) - 10 GB usage guideline
- Single - £29.99/month - unlimited usage
- Share - £45.00/month - unlimited usage
- Network - £65.00/month - unlimited usage
- Satellite (500 Kbit/s service) - £59.99/month - unlimited usage (subject to Fair Share Policy)
In 1984 the Telecommunications Act set the framework for a competitive market for telecoms services by abolishing BT's exclusive right to provide services. In the early 1990s the market was opened up and a number of new national Public Telecommunications Operators (PTOs) were given licences. This ended the duopoly that had existed in the 1980s when only BT and Mercury were licensed to provide fixed line telecom networks in the UK.
BT's
21st Century Network (21CN) is a network transformation project which will see the UK's telephone network move from the present AXE/
System X Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to an
Internet Protocol (IP) system.
BT envisages annual savings of £1 billion when the transition to the new network is complete (the majority of customers should be transferred by 2008). Capital expenditure is put at £10 billion over the next five years.
In 2006 BT is introducing ''BT vision'' a broadband Television service with the ability to watch programmes from previous weeks or months. This will be launched in October and it will be free to all BT broadband customers.
See also:
In 2001 BT discovered it owned a
Patent () which it believed gave it patent rights on the use of
Hyperlink technology on the
World Wide Web . The corresponding UK patent had already expired, but the US patent is valid until
2006 .
Opponents of BT's claim held that the patent had never been valid, due to prior art by both
Douglas Engelbart and
Ted Nelson 's
Project Xanadu . Nevertheless on
February 11 ,
2002 , BT began a court case relating to its claims in a US federal court against the
Internet Service Provider Prodigy Communications Corporation . The U.S. court ruled on
August 22 ,
2002 that the BT patent was not applicable to Web technology, and granted Prodigy's request for summary judgement.
See BT’s “Hyperlinking” Patent Litigation Fails The issue of prior art was thus not addressed.
