BT Group

BT is one of the world's leading providers of telecommunications services. Its principal activities include local, long distance and international telecommunications services, internet services and IT solutions. Telephone Company Ltd. merges with Edison Telephone Company to form United Telephone Company. British Telecom enters strategic alliance with MCI Communications to form Concert Communications Company. BT Group plc was formed in 2001 to serve as the holding company for British Telecommunications plc. British Telecommunications came into being in early 1984 through the transformation of a former state utility, at a turning point in the development of U.K. and European telecommunications. Since being privatized, BT has maintained its position as the dominant provider of local and long-distance telephone service in the United Kingdom, but has faced increasing competition and seen its market share fall as the English government continues to deregulate the market. BT has subsequently looked abroad for its future growth and is in the process of developing a global telecommunications network for multinational companies. British Telecommunications' administrative and technological roots are mingled with those of the U.K. Post Office and reach back into the second half of the 19th century, when inventors at home and abroad, such as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Guglielmo Marconi, were applying electromagnetic principles to the development of practicable forms of telecommunications. Out of this the modern telegraph, followed by the telephone, was born. In 1850 the first submarine telegraph cable was laid across the English Channel. In 1878 Bell demonstrated his newly patented telephone to Queen Victoria, and in 1879 England's first telephone exchange opened in London. It was in the United Kingdom, too, that the first international telephone call was made, in 1891, between England and France. The telegraph and telephone were at first exploited by private enterprises, but they were gradually taken over by a U.K. government department, the General Post Office. The reversal of that nationalization process was completed in the early 1990s. In 1869 the Postmaster General was granted the exclusive right to transmit telegrams within the United Kingdom. At first the telephone was slow to catch on and was not regarded by the Post Office as a serious threat to its telegraphic network. The first independent U.K. telephone service provider, Telephone Company Ltd., was set up in 1879 and in 1880 merged with its competitor, Edison Telephone Company, to form United Telephone Company. Seeing that the telephone was beginning to take customers away from its telegraph service, the Post Office embarked on a series of protective measures, and in 1880 the government brought an action against the recently formed United Telephone Company, claiming that it was operating in contravention of the Telegraph Act of 1869. The High Court subsequently decided that the telephone was a form of telegraph. The merger was revoked, and telephone companies were required to be licensed by the telegraph monopoly holder, the Post Office. The next stage in the process of squeezing out competition and establishing a state telephone monopoly was the building up of the Post Office's own system. In 1896 the Post Office completed its improved telephone network by taking over the trunk lines of National Telephone Company, the largest of its licensees, and started to set up its own local telephone exchanges. It was then decided that more national licenses would be granted. National Telephone Company continued to operate a local service until its license expired in 1911, but in 1912 the Post Office was granted a monopoly on the supply of telephone services throughout the United Kingdom. It took over all of National Telephone Company's exchanges and opened an automatic exchange in Epsom, south of London. Since 1899 several of the larger towns and cities, including