The UK Department of Trade & Industry awarded four new UK telecommunications licences, three to cover the provision of international satellite services, while the fourth allows the creation of a Metropolitan Area Network in London. City of London Telecommunications Ltd, which is 90% owned by the US Fidelity Management & Research Corp, is only the second company to win a new public telephone operators licence since the creation of the British Telecommunications Plc-Mercury Communications Ltd duopoly. The company intends to provide business services in London via point-to-point fibre optic lines at all levels from simple ring down circuits to high capacity links of 2Mbps, 8Mbps, 34Mbps and 155Mbps. The network will give access to both national and international carriers. The company says it will also customise configurations for businesses needing higher bandwidths or other specialised arrangements. The network architecture will be based around the Synchronous Digital Hierarchy standard. City of London Telecommunications or COLT – has already started construction of the network, which is expected to go on-line towards the end of the year. The three new satellite providers are Satellite Information Services Ltd, ESAT Telecommunications Ltd and PanAmSat LP. ESAT’s licence allows it to offer a full range of satellite services, with the exception of speech telephony. The company currently operates in Ireland. According to Mark Roden, ESAT’s director of corporate services, the company’s first service will be a UK-based transit facility for routing traffic from the Commonwealth of Independent States countries on to the US and Europe. PanAmSat, which covers the Americas and Europe, is the first privately-owned international satellite system. It plans new satellite launches in the next two years which will provide full global coverage. According to Mark Kingston, Satellite Information Services’ general manager of broadcast sales, the firm’s new licence merely replaces an existing Branch Systems General Licence covering uplink operations and connection to the public switched telephone network.
