The Futures Past of the UK’s Digital Communications Infrastructure

Britain’s national telecommunications infrastructure, operated in the past by the Post Office and, since 1981, by BT/Openreach, has been a key site for developing and implementing different plans for digitalising Britain.

The telecommunications engineers and managers who develop these plans, in both the past and present, have made these plans on longer time-scales than external stakeholders such as users and policymakers are used to, meaning that engineers have effectively set the UK’s digital infrastructure policy for decades.

This has led to long-term digitalisation programmes that have been:

• Overly ambitious, leading to developmental failures.
• Developed to preserve the incumbent’s (Post Office/BT/Openreach) commercial, monopolistic position against threats from alternative network companies.
• Isolated from the views of external stakeholders such as residential users, business users, and policy-makers.

Historically, large business users, particularly in the financial sector, have been best at orienting the incumbent network operator to their needs for digitalisation, meaning that the possibilities of a 'good' national, digital network infrastructure have focussed on technical and economic goods.

In order to broaden the policy space for future directions in the UK’s digital network infrastructure, policy-makers should therefore consider:

• Engaging with telecom strategists and engineers, especially in Openreach, much earlier in the development process
• Designing policies that mitigate against the unpredictability of digital futures, for example, by focussing on present societal needs rather than idealised long-term futures
• Developing better pathways for under-represented user groups, such as residential and small business users, to comment on digital communications policy
• Studying the feasibility of alternative structures for organising the provision and/or purchase of digital communication services, as organisational alternatives have historically been under-studied by policy-makers