3 miles (21 km) alongside the Great Western Railway from London Paddington to West Drayton. In parallel, Samuel Morse developed his system of dots and dashes used in the first telegraph from Baltimore to Washington in 1843. The initial idea was to bury the cable under ground but this proved unreliable and the telegraph pole was invented. The extension of the telegraph system across the US and subsequently in other big places like the Australian outback was dependent on finding sources of local timber for telegraph poles preferably Douglas fir and pine, hard to find in desert areas. 4 The wood then needed to be pressure treated against rot and insect and woodpecker attack. Such apparently mundane material considerations had and still have a direct impact on ongoing operational costs (the replacement cycle of telegraph poles) and cost per bit or in this example cost per dot and dash. 5 Fast forward 150 years. In March 2010, Virgin Media, a company started by Richard Branson announced6 plans to trial a 50 Mbps fibre service over telegraph poles to a remote Berkshire village. This followed a long battle with BT to get access to BT duct space and poles. The arguments for and against illustrate the ongoing dilemma posed by the question as to who really owns those poles. The answer at least morally if not legally is that we do. 14.4 Corporate Success and Failure - Case Studies - The Impact of Regulation and Competition Policy BT point out on their web site7 that they are the world's oldest telecommunications company with origins that can be traced back to the Electric Telegraph Company founded in 1846. The companies and early private investors in the telegraph system mostly ran out of money in a process closely parallel to the railway boom and replicated more recently when the channel tunnel was built with private finance. The channel tunnel is now owned by the banks who have sold the debt to the pension funds that we depend on for our possible future retirement SO by default we have paid for the channel tunnel even tho