The UK's new 'Ofcom' regulatory authority will make its debut later this year. As a converged authority overseeing telecomms and broadcasting, it will face a number of challenges. Not the least of these is the forlorn state of telecomms competition in the UK. Back in the 1980s, the UK was a cautious pioneer in European telecomms liber-alisation. The pioneering aspects―embracing network competition at a time when few in Europe and beyond would acknowledge the concept―was tempered by the caution of the duopoly policy which 'ring-fenced' the interests of the competitors to the part-privatised incumbent, British Telecom (BT). This only served to cartelise the market, with Cable & Wireless's UK arm Mercury acting as a 'me-too' BT lookalike and the incumbent resting quite comfortably on its lushly leafy laurels. This is easy to say with the binocular 20:20 vision of hindsight. It is all too convenient to forget the radical Shockwaves which the UK's policy of privatisation and competition subsequently sent across European telecomms. In fact, it took 15 years for the bulk of Europe to catch up.
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