The end of October was supposed to see the European launch of British Telecommunications Plc’s Frame Relay service, which is already up and running in the US. As recently as the end of September, BT was so confident that the service would be available that Peter Cook, BT’s Marketing Manager for Data Networks, was quoted in a BT press release as saying By the end of October the service will be available to our customers in the UK and continental Europe. Well, it’s now into November and still no sign of it, and numerous rumours are flying around as to just why this might be. One story is that installation of the switches has progressed slower than expected, with just a couple of switches installed in London, one in Paris, and installation imminent in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, although this should not be enough in itself to prevent BT making an announcement – even if it has to delay connecting its first customers. Another theory is that it has pitched its US tariffs wrongly (pricing throughout the rest of the world was to be based on this) and is rethinking its policy: its service there costs $2,100 per site per month, but the links into each node on the backbone run at a maximum of just 256Kbps which many people say is just too slow for the sort of high-end users who could afford the tariff. Similarly, BT has made plain that the service will run at its current speed of 56/64kbps until 1994, which would almost certainly detract from its appeal. BT remains coy about explaining the delay, although a spokeswoman said that an announcement concerning the service’s availability should be expected very shortly – if this is the case, the natural forum would be the Telecommunications Managers Association Show. Whether BT will have sorted its problems and have a service to sell by then is unclear.
