ugh we don't own it. Anyway back to telegraph companies. The public sector had to take over the failed telegraph businesses and became by default a competitor to the surviving private sector companies. The takeover 'vehicle' as it would be described today was the General Post Office, after all this was just another two-way communication service. The GPO was run as a government department. One of the longest private sector survivors was the National Telephone Company whose trunk telephone service was taken over by the GPO in 1896. In 1912 the GPO became the monopoly supplier of telephone services in the UK. A few local authority services survived 4 More information on this is available from www.telegraphpoles.com. The Victorian Internet authored by Tom Standage, ISBN 13: 9780425171691 Published 2002, available from Amazon or Abe Books discusses the impact of the telegraph on Victorian society. 6 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8562932.stm, 7 http://www.btplc.com/Thegroup/BTsHistory/History.htm Making Telecoms Work for a while, though the only long-term competitor proved to be the city telephone department in Kingston upon Hull, a town that has managed to successfully defy commercial logic both in telecommunications and bridge building but not in fish. In 1932 the idea was put forward that the GPO should become a nationalised industry but no progress was made on this until 1965 when a pipe-smoking Anthony Wedgewood-Benn raised the subject with Harold Wilson, then Labour Prime Minister. The result was one corporation split into two divisions: Post and Telecommunications, ratified in the Post Office Act of 1969 that then became two individual corporations with Post Office Telecommunications becoming British Telecom in 1980. And then everything started changing again. The British Telecommunications Act of 1981 introduced the concept of competition, empowering the Secretary of State to license other operators to run telecommunications systems and accept user equipment supplied by other third parties provided the 