Welcome to UKTelephony.website, my blog about telecommunications in the UK.
First, a little bit about me. I am James Tatum, a retired telecommunications engineer from the UK. I spent pretty much my entire career working for what is now called Openreach Limited. Over the 40 years that I worked in the UK telecommunications industry I have seen major changes, not only to the company but also to the industry itself. And this blog is my attempt to document some of those changes and the broader history of telecommunications in the UK.
When I started my telecommunications career in March 1981, it was with Post Office Telecommunications, which at the time was a state-owned corporation that had previously been a division of the Post Office. Not long after I started working for them, the name was changed to British Telecom (BT), but the organisation remained state-owned with a monopoly on telecommunications in the UK.
In 1982, BT lost its monopoly on telecommunications when a licence was granted to Mercury Communications and the Government of the time announced plans to sell shares in BT to the public, which took place in three tranches in December 1984, December 1991 and July 1993 after which, the company was entirely publicly owned and trading as BT.
In 2006, the maintenance of the telecommunications infrastructure (the telephone cables, ducts, cabinets and exchanges) was transferred to wholly owned subsidiary of BT called Openreach as part of an agreement between BT and the UK’s telecoms regulator, Ofcom, to ensure that rival telecom operators would have equal access to the local network that BT controlled. With that transfer, as an engineer, I also moved to work for Openreach, which is where I remained in a variety of roles until my retirement earlier this year.
Sitting here, writing this post on my smartphone that is connected via Wi-Fi to my home network, it is amazing to think that when I started my career most homes in the UK had a single fixed telephone line. In the subsequent 40 years, we have seen pagers, fax machines, basic mobile phones and dial-up Internet come and go, to be replaced by the ubiquitous broadband and smartphones that we all have today.