The UK Post Office is enthusiastically helping a cable television entrepreneur to do battle with its former other half, British Telecommunications Plc by lending its private digital telephone network to what has been grandly dubbed The National Network. Launched yesterday, The National Network is a digital communications network offering speech, data and video facilities to private subscribers over spare capacity on the Post Office’s network, which currently has 25,000 users, operates from 200 locations, and has capacity for 12m telephone calls per year as well as supporting continuous data communications between 4,500 terminals. The network has been built up over the past two years and has digital switches from GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd. Claimed benefits of the new service are that it offers switched data and videoconferencing facilities as well as a telephone service that is available at a fixed monthly price. The National Network has three main services: VoiceCall, VideoCall and DataCall. VoiceCall is fully digital and is based on a fixed price structure. Subscribers pay a once-only connection charge of UKP1,000 and then a monthly charge of UKP167, no matter how many calls are made. But the key attractions are DataCall and VideoCall, since they are far cheaper than comparable services offered by Mercury Communications or British Telecom. For at the moment users without their own private network have to lease lines from the public operators or use a service such as British Telecom’s X25 Packet SwitchStream Service. With leased lines users pay for the distance over which the line runs, while with a packet switch users are charged by the volume of the data sent. With VideoCall, however, users pay a once only connection charge of UKP1,500 and are then charged at a set rate for 15 minutes use, depending on the user’s contracted usage time per week. For example, if contracted for four hours a week, 15 minutes of videoconferencing would cost UKP16.30. Similarly with DataCall, which uses 64Kbps connections to any subscriber, a once only connection charge of UKP750 is payable, with a usage charge of UKP8.15 per 15 minutes if the user is contracted for four hours per week. The VideoCall and DataCall services are being developed as a joint marketing effort with Rank Xerox Ltd which is also the Network’s first customer. Rank Xerox is supporting these services with its document capture processing technology. The National Network does not offer packet switching services and has no plans to do so, although the Post Office may allow another company to provide such a service to subscribers on its network. Michael Davis, founder of Windsor Television Ltd, is the executive chairman of The National Network and owns 90% of it: he is talking to other organisations with extensive networks, such as British Rail, to enable him to increase the carrying capacity of The National Network. He expects to have signed up thousands of subscribers by year-end and says that the Network should be profitable within 18 months. The National Network plans to phase in a Public Switched Telephone Network service and hopes to have the first breakout points ready in two to three months. It also plans to offer a MobileCall service and is negotiating to offer a primary or back-up service with a two-way cordless Personal Communications Network lisensee. And Davis did coyly admit that The National Network aspires to be a public telephone operator.
