Oftel chief berates the reluctant unbundlers

These things can be a bit on the dry side (that's a polite way of saying extremely dull.)

So little did we think he'd come back with the kind of quotations EastEnders script writers would die for.

The Committee, chaired by Martin O'Neill MP, had before it none other than David Edmonds of Oftel fame. And O'Neill proved a worthy advocate (which is a polite way of saying what Edmonds was thinking at the time.)

O'Neill suggested Oftel has dragged its heels over - well, pretty much everything. "Lazy is the way that I would describe the speed of your consultation process," he said. "Your complacency is quite appalling. One can't blame BT if you can't police them."

But Edmonds fought back over allegations that BT had been deliberately obstructive when it comes to opening up its networks, and Oftel had done nothing about it. "We have asked BT, no, told BT, that they must treat operators as customers, not as nasty incubus coming in. We have been very tough indeed with BT."

Oooh, handbags.

O'Neill was undaunted. The debate turned to the mobile phone market. "If you've got the powers, why don't you use them? Week after week consumers are buying mobile phones and tariffs they don't want or understand... Gas and electricity have been whipped into line in a way that you haven't managed."

Edmonds gave an interesting insight into his relationship with our favourite telco. "You need to hit BT with a club five times and on the sixth they come up with what you want. We have had trench warfare all this summer."

Trench warfare with clubs... Hmmm. In a final big push, Edmonds admitted he'd been tempted to send BT executives to prison. Blimey.

O'Neill still wasn't impressed. "Frankly, BT was taking you for a ride."

O'Neill and Edmonds will go down in history as the Peggy Mitchell and Pat Butcher of the telecoms world ("You bitch," "You slag," etc.) Fortunately, they're considerably more eloquent. Gentlemen - and especially Mr O'Neill - we salute you.

Unmetered woes with AOL

And telecoms used to be so dull... On 8 November, AOL UK announced it was offering all its customers unmetered net access for £14.99 a month. It claimed to have worked a way through the complex tariff structure here (see http://www.silicon.com/a40687 for details), unlike many of its competitors, most notably World Online, which scrapped its unmetered offering in September because it was having to subsidise users to the tune of £700.

Then this week, AOL France started capping users of its unmetered offering to 30 minutes at peak times because its network can't handle the demand.

The UK's Freeserve has now blocked 1,300 customers from its unmetered offering, claiming they'd been abusing the service by staying online for ridiculous lengths of time (a claim disputed by some users), causing its network to creak a bit.

But there's politics at work here too, and AOL seems to be playing the game rather well (even if the poor old customer is being used as a pawn in its Machiavellian machinations). A spokesman for AOL admitted what's going on in France is part of the process to prove to politicians and regulators throughout Europe that there is huge demand for unmetered access.

The nub of the matter is how the owner of the local loop charges other operators for access. BT currently charges ISPs on a per second basis, making it hard for them to offer economically viable unmetered services to their own customers. The ISPs then have to pay to transfer that traffic to their own networks.

Strange, then, that just one week after AOL UK ploughed ahead regardless, Oftel published a consultation document (http://www.silicon.com/a40807 ) which will almost certainly lead to BT having to drop per second charging from next February.

Either that girl with the strange dress in the AOL ads knows a lot more than she's letting on, or this is just a case of weird IT synchronicity. Who knows?

The usual suspects - e-envoy potentials

Staying in government circles, the e-minister this week said that the new e-envoy will focus on e-government, not e-vangelism.

Speaking to silicon.com after her tour of India (go to the site and do a search on the word 'India' to find our exclusive coverage of that jaunt), Patricia Hewitt said that hitting Tony Blair's 2005 target for getting government services online is the toughest task the e-envoy will face.

"When we originally conceived the post a lot of British companies hadn't taken up the challenge of ecommerce and boardrooms just weren't focused on the issues at all," she said. "Now that has changed and we have people like Jim Norton and George Cox at the Institute of Directors banging the drum very effectively to their own members."

Meanwhile, three possible candidates for the post had a little tête a tête (or rather a tête a tête a tête... there were three of them after all) on Tuesday evening at an event organised by the Bathwick Group.

The three e-musketeers were Richard Barrington, director of industry within the office of the e-envoy Rene Carayol, CEO of ebusiness consultancy Voodoo and Thomas Power, founder of the Ecademy.

They debated issues such as the skills gap, the precise nature of the job and the track record of government in high-tech matters. Carayol has a rather different view from Hewitt when it comes to what being an e-envoy is all about. "It's not a political role and it's not about solving failed government IT delivery. It's about being an e-visionary for UK Plc."

Was that a gong I heard?

Barrington, the bookies' favourite to get the nod, was keen to defend the government's record to date. "There is a huge amount we're doing, but it's received zero coverage."

Power came up with the best mixed metaphor of the night, but also the best sound bite. "It's inadequate that Tony Blair, William Hague and Charles Kennedy can't use a PC. If they can't eat the dog food, they can't lead us to the promised land."

So that's how Moses did it.

But rather more pithily, Power said: "The government has a vision but no cause. Vision with no action is hallucination."

Indeed. And that's it for now. If you fancy sharing your thoughts with other readers (you should know by now that the person who comes up with the best reader comment will win a Sony Vaio, so get online and get typing.)

In the meantime, we'll be hallucinating happily until next Friday...