Information society : agenda for action in the UK : evidence received after 31 March 1996 / Select Committee on Science and Technology.
- Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords. Science and Technology Committee.
- Date:
- 1996
Licence: Open Government Licence
Credit: Information society : agenda for action in the UK : evidence received after 31 March 1996 / Select Committee on Science and Technology. Source: Wellcome Collection.
61/324 page 363
![23 April 1996] [ Continued Baroness Hogg contd. ] little companies can get off the ground in the next five years”, they look at me with astonishment. That is in effect what you get -the big player slowed down to allow one or two small companies to see if they can make it. That is a bad principle even though I fully accept there needs to be a basis upon which small companies can get off the ground. Fortunately in the service provider world it is in our interest to get small companies off the ground, we have actually got to encourage them by example, by help, by doing everything possible to get service providers up and running because without them our network investment is wasted. Lord Flowers 512. Could I just interrupt a second. I wonder whether you could be specific about what changes you would like to see in the regulatory framework? (Dr Rudge) I can be specific about some of the issues, they are rather complex some of them and they would be best addressed by note rather than verbally. We have had the discussion over the asymmetry issue many times and I think a mistake was made the last time it was renewed. The House of Commons’ Select Committee did make a recommendation which was not ideal from our point of view but we thought was practical and it suggested a progressive removal of this barrier over a period. The idea to give cable companies at least seven years start in this area. We and the cable companies welcomed that report when it was made but it was not acted upon. I think that was unfortunate because it was an example of where some regulatory barriers could have been moved away to allow players like us to address the whole market and not parts of it. There are other constraints particularly if you look at the area of fixed/mobile conversion, where mobile services and fixed network services are beginning to evolve together rather than as separate services. The customer does not really want to know who is handling the traffic, he wants a service which may involve both mobile and fixed networks. We have wanted to take control of Cellnet, a company we own 60 per cent of, but we cannot do that. There are many examples that I could give of specific pieces of regulatory activity that prevent us pursuing what I would consider to be the normal course of business. Lord Gregson 513. I had not realised that you were fundamentally constrained on the radio system. Take me as an example, I shall never get cable because I am right at the top of a long hill. I have a colleague who is in the same situation. I cannot get satellite unless I build a huge mast myself because the hill is in the way because I live in a valley. I can see the television aerial, the television repeater, I can see your blasted Cellnet transmitter on another hill some distance away but I shall never get any useful services out of that lot in effect. You would not be allowed to use either of those services to assist me, would you? (Dr Rudge) Let me ask John Butler to expand upon it. The fact is we have had a long, long battle over this question of what we call‘radio tails’. That is, being able to use radio at the fringe of the network to reach out. We have had some easement, not total but some easement, recently. (Mr Butler) The answer depends upon where you live. If you live in Wales then the answer is probably yes and if you live in England the answer is probably no. We are about to be given radio licences for telephony provision in a very great proportion of the country covering a very small proportion of the population. In broad terms the radio licences cover most of Scotland, most of Wales and most of Northern Ireland but not very much of England. 514. I live in the Pennines so that is out I presume. (Dr Rudge) Yes, you are out. (Mr Butler) Those are for telephony applications, not broadband applications. They will be of use in reducing the cost of providing a universal service in those areas but will not be of great use in providing the sort of broadband digital services that we are talking about in connection with the information society. (Dr Rudge) This is an example of using technology constraints, in this case it is a sort of geographic technology constraint, that makes our business quite difficult in terms of justifying the use of these technologies on a national basis. Lord Craig of Radley 515. The BBC earlier suggested to us that especially as digital terrestrial transmissions will replace analogue householders will choose a single delivery system for all services and they quoted, for example, a reduction in television aerials in Germany. That is a bit premature but nevertheless I will be interested in your views and comments about the concept that householders will wish to constrain themselves to a single path for all the various digital media, including telecoms, that could be made available to them. (Dr Rudge) I do not think every customer will prefer one path but I do think customers, by and large, prefer to have integrated service provision and not to get a bit from here and a bit from there and have to deal with maybe half a dozen different suppliers for different elements of the service that they want, even if you can provide it across half a dozen suppliers. Certainly these different delivery media that you are referring to will be competitive. They will not be competitive as technical means of delivery, but in terms of the service package they offer the customer and the price they offer it at. At different times and in different locations different delivery mechanisms will have advantages and therefore the package will have an advantage. Our problem is that because of the various constraints our package starts to become a very funny shape, or we go to all sorts of devious lengths to try to get round the situation where, for example, we cannot deliver by radio in the Pennines although we can do it somewhere else. Then we have to think of some way of getting round these objections. It leads the development to be slower because you have got to find a solution and it also makes it more expensive because you cannot solve it universally. Sometimes it means we cannot do it at all for a while and have to delay. So quite frankly we are](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32218631_0061.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
