The past 20 years have denied telecoms its natural development as a medium for two-way communication by the general public. Driven by the stock market and the thinking of the finance sector, the industry has concentrated on obvious profit opportunities - global business communications and TV and internet delivery. September 11 changed all that. With air travel suddenly becoming something to avoid, people are looking urgently to telecommunications to provide a serious alternative.
We need countrywide and international two-way videophone and video-conferencing services good enough for people to use on a massive scale to replace both planes and cars. Quite apart from public safety, even the environmentalists seem not to have noticed the immense potential of this for reducing pollution. We have the technology; and at first sight it is just a matter of finding the investment and getting on with it. But it isn't as easy as that.
The result of two decades of the "free market" in telecoms in Britain is a mosaic of managements, networks and technologies that is peculiarly ill-adapted to this. If you want a video-conference today you have to rent an expensive, specially set up, network that is likely to be available only to other customers of your own operator. There is a public videophone service of sorts available between BT customers with ISDN2, but it has never caught on.
Conventional telephone services, in which every single telephone can talk to every other telephone, was created by a single national operator. To make it work today there have to be laborious interworking arrangements between the various competing networks.
Getting public videophone going countrywide from scratch would be next to impossible with so many disparate managements and technologies. Unified management and technical direction is essential.
This call from the public cannot be denied. The department for trade and industry under its new secretary of state will simply have to put aside its traditional objections to "monopoly" and persuade the operators to pool their UK network resources to create a single operation. Stranger things have happened recently - look at Railtrack.
The straightforward way would be for Future BT and its competitors to come together. But if this seems just too improbable, there may be another way.
In the past few months, one outside company has stated an interest in buying BT's complete fixed line network and another has stated a similar interest in the local cable and exchange network.
Both are reported as saying that if their bids succeed they will allow others to use their networks to provide services for the public. If one or other of these can be encouraged to succeed, the next step seems obvious: induce the cable TV companies to sell their wired networks to the successful bidder for the BT network.
All would gain from this. The new unified operator would gain important economies of scale compared with its predecessors and would inherit some important building blocks of technology. The cable TV companies' broadband distri bution plans, which together cover half the country, need only a minimum of adaptation for two way operation. BT's network is further behind but ADSL is a first step.
BT would get a major contribution to its debt; the cable companies would escape from their long agony of unrewarding investment in competing plant; and both they and BT would be free to evolve for the future.
Whichever way it is done, it will take time and cost money to meld the present hotchpotch into a proper countrywide broadband network on which competing retailers could develop videophone and other advanced services.
But with the opportunity created by the consequences of the tragic events of September 11, the chances of commercial success should be very good. Nationally, the telecoms sector would get a badly needed boost; and we would for the first time have a serious alternative to physical travel.
· Comments to online.feedback @theguardian.com
· John Harper is the author of Monopoly and Competition in British Telecommunications (Pinter)
