Two weeks after Mercury Communications Ltd announced the extinction of its Callpoint Telepoint operation, Ferranti International Plc has written off a UKP16m investment and sold its 64% stake in Telepoint operator Zonephone (CI No 1,720). Ferranti has been looking for a buyer for the stake for some time, but has now decided to sell to the minority shareholders for a nominal sum – suggesting that no outside buyers were forthcoming. Ferranti will write off the whole of its UKP16m investment in Zonephone and Cable & Wireless Plc has chosen to sell its minority shareholding at the same time. The remaining minority shareholders are four venture capital firms, Electra Investment Trust, Fleming Ventures, Melville Street Investments and the British Technology Group. The groups have invested around UKP9m in the business so far and admit that their ultimate strategy is to stabilise the business in order to build it into an attractive, sellable asset. The new company, renamed Libera Telecom Ltd will focus on providing a two-way Neighbourhood Telepoint service, for which it will seek new capital backing. Neighbourhood Telepoint consists of a multi channel public base station, located near domestic and small business premises which provides two way Telepoint access to the public telephone network, therefore replacing the final wire link. For the moment, the basic public Telepoint Zonephone service remains suspended and the company is negotiating the other two Telepoint consortia, Hutchison Telecommunications Ltd’s Rabbit and British Telecommunications Plc’s Phonepoint, to take on the subscribers – betwen 2,000 and 3,000. Zonephone has around 2,000 base stations, mostly within the M25 motorway around London, and Libera says it is in the process of testing the stations for compliance with the inter-roaming common air interface standard. A spokesman said that a public Telepoint service based on the standard may be revived once the Neighbourhood Telepoint scheme gets off the ground. However this is unlikely to happen unless a new partner can be found.
