British Telecommunications Plc has finally agreed to interconnect its UK electronic mail service with the service offered by US Sprint’s Sprint International. The agreement follows weeks of deliberation and comes after the British Standards Institute finalised a UK standard requiring all public carriers in the UK to interconnect. The standard is intended to establish a national electronic mail backbone so that users can take advantage of all public systems, rather than being locked in to the services offered by one. But Telecom, the UK’s largest carrier, had been blocking the formation of a national network which will almost inevitably lead to it losing market share. Sprint has been pushing for interconnection for some time, but when it did eventually open negotiations, Telecom reportedly asked a UKP10,000 fee for physical connection and a UKP75,000 access charge. However Sprint has now confirmed that BT has agreed to interconnect free of charge. British Telecom is linked to about 70 closed electronic mail groups while Sprint has around 20. Previously, users had to subscribe to both Sprint’s SprintMail and British Telecom’s Gold 400 to send messages to correspondents on another system. And they were unable to route mail on a per message basis, using the cheapest carrier for each message. Although Sprint is the only offical competition to British Telecom other carriers offering public messaging in the UK include AT&T Co and MCI Communications Corp, both of which have been connected to British Telecom for some time. Sprint is connected to AT&T and says that it is in the process of negotiating links with MCI Mail.
