products complied with performance and quality benchmarks set by the British Standards Institute, a process described then and now as liberalisation. In 1982, Cable & Wireless were licensed to run a public telecommunications network through a subsidiary, Mercury Communications and the government announced its intention to privatise British Telecom, a decision ratified by the Telecommunications Act of 1984. Two years earlier the UK had awarded two cellular licenses to consortia led by BT and Racal Millicom. The £25k license fee was considered to be expensive by the financial analyst community and Racal's prediction of 250 000 UK cell phone users by 1989, over three times more than the estimates of rival bidders was considered dangerously optimistic. By 1999 Racal (Vodafone) and BT (Cellnet) together had 1.1 million customers. Early business plans were predicated on high-priced mobile or transportable handsets, low penetration (under 2%) and low network cost to achieve profitability. BT and Securicor invested £4 million each in the original business plan. In July 1999 British Telecom bought Securicor's 40% stake in Cellnet for £3. .15bn making the mobile phone operator its wholly owned subsidiary. Cellnet had made £118 million profit the previous year. The business, by then rebranded as O2, was sold to Telefonica in 2005 for £18 billion. In that sense liberalisation was good for BT and to all intents and purposes for the gov- ernment, who sold all remaining shares in the business in July 1993 raising £5 billion for the Treasury and introducing 750 000 new shareholders to the company. In parallel, in 1991 the government had announced the end of the BT/Mercury duopoly of wire-line provision. Independent 'retail' companies were permitted to bulk-buy telecommu- nications capacity and sell it in packages to business and domestic users. Feeling squeezed in its local market, BT set off on a series of foreign adventures. In June 1994, BT and MCI Communication Corporation, the second largest carrier of long- distance teleco