In message , at 17:58:26 on
Fri, 6 Jan 2012, Charles Ellson remarked:
Mercury was also mentioned but unlike BT they had nothing in the way of
a universal service obligation and served a very small market.

I'm not aware that dialling the Mercury Access code was in any way
restricted, other than people, wherever they were, signing up for a
Mercury subscription.

Mercury was not providing the infrastructure for that service, merely
using an established provider to connect the calls to their much
smaller network, a bit like Sainsburys being obliged to allow a
competitor to set up order desks within its premises.

It's a bit more complicated than that, because Mercury was, where
available, able to use its own infrastructure for backbone and
international calling (which was after all C&W's core business).

The main thing they were doing was sharing the local loop, and the
domestic market was always a bit of a distraction from their offering to
businesses.
--
Roland Perry