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Telecommunications in the United Kingdom

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History

Telegraph engineer William Preece demonstrated Alexander Graham Bell's telephone in Britain in 1877. The General Post Office (GPO) had by then nationalised electrical telegraphy in the United Kingdom. After an 1880 court decision found that the GPO's telegraph monopoly extended to the telephone, the GPO awarded licences to private companies to build telephone networks around the country.

National Telephone Company (NTC) was a British telephone company from 1881 until 1911, which brought together smaller local companies. Under the Telephone Transfer Act 1911 it was taken over by the GPO in 1912.

The telephone service in the United Kingdom was originally provided by private companies and local city councils, but by 1912–13 all except the telephone service of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire and Guernsey had been bought out by the General Post Office. Post Office Telephones also operated telephone services in Jersey and the Isle of Man until 1969 when the islands took over responsibility for their own postal and telephone services. Post Office Telephones was reorganised in 1980–81 as British Telecommunications (British Telecom, or BT), and was the first nationalised industry to be privatised by the Conservative government. The civil telecoms monopoly ended when Mercury Communications arrived in 1983.

Broadcasting of radio and television was a duopoly of the BBC and Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA): these two organisations controlled all broadcast services, and directly owned and operated the broadcast transmitter sites. Mobile phone and Internet services did not then exist. Broadcast transmitters, which belonged to the BBC and IBA, were privatised during the 1990s and now belong to Babcock International and Arqiva.

British Rail Telecommunications was created in 1992 by British Rail (BR). It was the largest private telecoms network in Britain, consisting of 17,000 route kilometres of fibre optic and copper cable which connected every major city and town in the country and provided links to continental Europe through the Channel Tunnel. BR also operated its own national trunked radio network providing dedicated train-to-shore mobile communications, and in the early 1980s BR helped establish Mercury Communications', now C&WC, core infrastructure by laying a resilient 'figure-of-eight' fibre optic network alongside Britain's railway lines, spanning London, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester.

Regulation of communications has changed many times during the same period, and most of the bodies have been merged into Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries.

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