This is an insider's account of the major developments in the UK's telecommunications industry. The author of this study argues that the British experiment with competing public telecommunications networks is hindering, not helping, competition and the development of information highways in the UK. He makes radical proposals for a new telecommunications structure for Britain and the countries of the EU. The volume includes a detailed financial and statistical assessment of Post Office and BT performance up to the present day. It also provides first-hand accounts of the problems of managing a big utility in the "stop-go" economy of the 1970s, the increasingly stormy industrial relations record of those years, and the tortuous story underlying the System X digital exchange development programme. The book demonstrates that many of the changes affecting telecommunications made by the early Thatcher governments, were desirable and indeed even overdue.