Our first OFTEL submission (8 March 1999) After a great deal of hard work from the committee, and two members in particular (Nick and Richard), our submission following OFTEL's Bringing Higher Bandwidth Services to the Consumer discussion document is complete and delivered. The submission, and a link to the discussion document, are on our Responses page. The discussion document posed, in effect, two questions: How can we avoid the mistakes of the past? How can outside operators deliver services over the local loop (the 'last mile' of copper wire from the exchange to the front room, currently owned and operated monopolistically by BT or individual cable operators)? The second question is the crux of the matter, and I suggest we've produced a readable document which puts forward a challenging point of view; our solution to local loop unbundling (taking control away from its current owners) is more radical than any of the five suggestions OFTEL put forward. Our solution is developed on 'the Internet way of doing things' (a decentralised organisation rather than a monolithic body issuing edicts) as, we believe, more and more companies will see the benefits of that approach. Would the Internet have evolved in the extraordinary way it has if someone had planned and costed it? Of course, the problem with total unbundling, as we point out, is that the existing operators will want compensation for the local loop being taken away from them. A fearfully difficult issue, but we've brought that issue out into the open.