Plessey Co has applied to British Telecom to become a joint public pay-phone operator using its highly successful robust intelligent pay telephones. Director of Plessey Telecommunications David Dey says that despite British Telecom’s evident distaste for the business, the payphone market is potentially extremely lucrative. In particular, Plessey claims that the intelligence embedded in its range of payphones could enable it to make money out of the business. Monopoly payphone operator British Telecom has never been interested enough in the service to invest substantially in it, and the operation currently makes a loss. The Office of Telecommunications has not yet decided how and in what context to liberalise the pay-phone market, and before it does so a standard must be set for equipment. Oftel says it aims to get such a standard ready by the end of 1987 and is now taking views from industry on how the market might be run in the future.
