London’s big cable television operators have agreed in principle to link their fibre optic networks, according to a report in the Financial Times. The impetus for the move comes from fairly prosaic business needs, however has some interesting implications for the future of local-loop telephony provision. The news comes in the same week that CIT Research Ltd issued a report predicting that 700,000 households and 100,000 businesses will subscribe to a phone service via a cable TV network by the year 2000. Study director Rob Ollerenshaw reckons that though 40% of households will have access to cable by that date, business users will prove to be the biggest market, providing UKP100m of turnover out of the projected UKP350m annual market.
