Shuffling the jigsaw (13 November 2000) There has been much press coverage of the BT partial breakup. Most of what was announced was no surprise, having been leaked by accident or design beforehand, but one change was somewhat unexpected: the proposed separation of UK network operations, including BT's local loop, from UK services. The separation is far from complete and may never be as, at the moment, only 25 per cent at most of the new company is intended to be sold off. Too many people have naïvely stated that such a separation would solve most or all of BT's problems. The devil is in the - unstated - detail and, in any case, anyone travelling by railway at the moment will realise that separating networks from services need not be a panacea; the seemingly constant restructuring of the UK cable industry is another unpromising forerunner. Those said, we are cautiously optimistic for two main reasons: Assuming BT plays fair and gives everyone, not just other BT subsidiaries, equal access to its services, the restructuring could be to the greater good of the greater number. Perhaps BT has finally realised that its competitors would quite often be happy to collaborate with it and buy services from it given, for want of a better cliché, a level playing field. Some light may be shed on BT's internal workings; before now it has been difficult to verify that BT Openworld and BT Internet, among other subsidiaries, are not being given preferential treatment. Would they now be able to go outside BT for their connectivity needs if they felt they could get a better deal elsewhere? We hope so. Eighteen months ago we submitted a paper, Option Zero, to OFTEL's consultation process on local loop unbundling. In it we proposed that local loops should be taken away from BT and cable operators, with compensation paid if deemed necessary, and run by non-profit organisations with no axes to grind and hence every interest in equal access to local loops. We knew, at the time, that what we proposed would almost certainly never happen as it was way beyond what OFTEL would ever mandate. But we had to fill in the gap in the consultation paper and get the issues talked about, and they most certainly were; you would be surprised at the people who have sidled up to us over the intervening months and said, out of the corner of their mouths, 'We think local loops should be taken away from BT and run by a non-profit organisation ...'. Whatever effect Option Zero has had on BT we do not know, but it cannot have been null and, really, BT has made as bold a move towards the Option Zero proposals as it could reasonably have been expected to make.