Yorkshire Electricity Plc has entered the telecommunications market with a splash. Virtually simultaneously, as well as teaming up with Hull City Council’s Kingston Communications Ltd – the company that uniquely runs the town’s local telephone system and is busy expanding beyond its base – in applying for its own telecommunications operator’s licence (CI No 1,944), it has revealed that it has invested in Ionica Ltd, the start-up company licensed to establish a fixed wireless telephone network in the UK. Yorkshire Electricity, in common with the other electricity companies to have applied for licences, already has an extensive internal network in place. The recently-privatised electricity operating company serves around 6,700 miles square in the north-east of England, including Bradford, Sheffield and Hull as well as its Leeds base. Until now, its network has been used for internal administration, and alongside the use of the existing infrastructure, it is to be expanded in phases from 1993. Rather than a pre-planned implementation, the company is to match the rollout to customer demand, according to Phil Brown, Yorkshire’s development manager. The network will be a mixture of fibre optics and radio transmission equipment. Kingston’s role seems to be a managerial one, with Yorkshire exploiting its partner’s experience as a public telephone operator; the establishment of a joint venture company is a necessary move for regulatory reasons, since Kingston’s licence is purely for the Kingston-upon-Hull area. The investment in Cambridge-based Ionica, the extent of which has not been revealed, seems to be a calculated move to get its first telecommunications customer on board. Brown confirms that Ionica may want to use us, describing the services that Yorkshire and Kingston will offer as those of a carrier’s carrier. While the Yorkshire-Kingston joint-venture company is applying for a full telecommunications operator’s licence, it says that its initial services will be private network services to large corporate customers and other telecommunications operators. For Ionica, the advantages of exploiting an existing infrastructure are obvious, and when combined with Yorkshire’s financial investment – for a small company, Ionica has a mammoth task ahead of it if it is to get the funds necessary to establish its service – the relationship is even more advantageous. Whether some of the other electricity providers follow the same path remains to be seen. In addition to Yorkshire Electricity, Ionica has revealed the identies of other backers, although it has given no details on the extend of each’s investment. These include institutional backers Ivory & Sime Ltd and Robert Fleming Ltd, together with a group of investors represented by the Anglo-American banking specialist Fox-Pitt & Kelton.
