Cable & Wireless Plc announced yesterday that after disagreement over directions, it had bought Motorola Inc’s 40% stake in the Mercury Personal Communications Ltd mobile phone company, and Mercury Personal Communications announced that it and the Unitel Personal Communications Ltd consortium of Northern Telecom Ltd, Thorn EMI Plc, US West Inc and the Deutsche Bundespost Telekom will save 40% of their start-up costs by building a common network. The two, which stress that they will offer fully competing services, say they will develop a Parallel Network Architecture that will support physically co-existent but logically separate networks. A new organisation equally owned by the two will be established to manage design, planning, construction and maintenance of the network, but each will be free to add their own additional infrastructure. Hutchison Telecommunications Ltd’s Microtel is left out of the party and comments that it has already placed orders worth over UKP65m for equipment and that its rivals are having to play catch-up.
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