Post Office back in the phone business to take on BT

The Post Office is to use its strong brand, and C&W's network, to take on BT in the residential phone market with its HomePhone service.

It will join other C&W customers such as Tescos, British Gas and Lloyds bank in offering customer pre-select (CPS) services to homes and small businesses and carve out a chunk of the ex-monopoly's 21 million customers.

The Post Office will restrict itself to selling the service. It has brought in Inkfish to provide call centre support and Servista to handle customer care and billing. The service is to go live "early next year", according to a spokesman.

The Post Office spokesman said the marketing budget was commercially confidential and that the tariffs were still in the process of being worked out. The plan is to have a million customers in five years. C&W is committed to providing a scalable network for the service.

All the partners in the project, especially the Post Office, make a point of mentioning what a strong brand it has, not to mention the 16,000 branches (before closures).

It is; the largest cash handler in the country, with £140bn passing through its hands every year, the biggest foreign exchange dealer, and has 170 products and services from phonecards through travel services to licence applications.

And, oh yes, it runs a postal service.

It also has an interesting history – 350 years of it, to be exact. More recently, however is the point that until 1981, British Telecom, once Post Office Telecommunications, was a part of the Post Office. Carved out in that year, it was launched on the stock market in one of the biggest privatisations ever in 1984.

In 1982, C&W became the first operator allowed to challenge the BT's previous monopoly in the UK.