Comms4Business News

BT Tower, now a Grade II listed building (formerly known as the Post Office Tower) was originally opened to staff by Prime Minister Harold Wilson MP and the then Postmaster-General, Anthony Wedgwood Benn on Friday 8 October 1965.

Widely acclaimed, the Tower was Britain’s highest building, standing at 620 ft (189 metres), including a 40 ft (12 metre) lattice aerial on top of it, until the construction of the Nat West Tower which was completed in 1980. BT Tower is now the seventh tallest structure in London, the tallest being One Canada Square at Canary Wharf (completed in 1991) at 237 metres.

The Tower was initially designed to carry aerials for the Post Office microwave network. It was built so tall because the microwave signals need an unobstructed route between each station, clear of the highest buildings and surrounding hills. One of its key functions was to help meet the growing demands of broadcasting, enabling the use of microwaves instead of traditional landlines for transmitting television signals. It also attracted much attention and admiration for its ‘Top of the Tower’ revolving restaurant sited on the 34th floor. Revolutionary at the time, some 105,000 dined there during the first year of opening. Still in full working order today, the 3-metre wide revolving segment spins through 360º every 22 minutes, a speed of 0.17 km/h.

Forty years on, the Tower remains an important part of the BT network and handles around one million switched calls, around 3,000 a day. 99% of all live football and most terrestrial television passes through the BT Tower.

David Hay, Head of BT Heritage, comments: “The tower is an iconic symbol of London, that everybody immediately recognises and, though taller buildings now exist, it is viewed with great affection by the general public. Whilst declared a national monument in 2001 by English Heritage, and listed by the Government in 2003 as ‘a cultural and architectural icon of Harold Wilson's 'white heat of technology', it still plays as important a role in the UK’s communications as it did in 1965.”

Construction of the tower began in 1961, costing £2.5 million – a small sum by today’ standards. It weighs 13,000 tons, including 95 tons of high tensile steel in the base and 695 tons of mild steel in the structure, and contains 50,000 square feet of glass. It was designed to sway no more than 20 centimetres (almost 8 inches) each way in winds up to 100 mph. Heat and cold cause the structure to expand and contract. The BT Tower can be as much as 23 centimetres shorter in the winter than it is in the summer.

Originally open to the public, during its first year the Tower was visited by almost one million visitors and quickly became one of London’s most popular tourist attractions. Visitors were transported by the tower's two lifts, which are still among the fastest in Europe, travelling at 6 metres per second. During that first year alone the lifts travelled almost 70,000 kilometres. The BT Tower remains the only building in the country which is allowed to be evacuated by lift (an oddity which required Parliamentary legislation to be passed).

The Tower has had its fair share of dramatic events, not least of all on 31 October 1971 when a bomb exploded on the 31st floor. The result of the bombing was a tightening of security that left the Tower largely closed to the public on a permanent basis. However, the restaurant remained in operation until 1980, when that too was closed to the public for security reasons, except for hospitality events and charity fund-raising functions, such as Comic Relief and BBC television’s Children In Need fund-raiser that takes place every November.

The offer, which runs until December 31, continues BT’s commitment to take advantage of the lower costs of providing calls over the internet in order to offer much cheaper rates. Currently, the company offers calls to Australia with no call charges for up to one hour with BT Communicator with Yahoo! Messenger.

BT is also offering customers the chance to make BT Communicator calls from their laptops at 7,800 BT Openzone Wi-Fi hotspots without paying any access subscription or per-minute charges.

Gavin Patterson, BT group managing director, Consumer, said: “We were the first telecoms company to offer voice over internet two years ago and we intend to keep ahead of the game. There’s been a lot of hype about Skype, but these international calls are half their price. .

“We are not going to sit back while competitors lure our customers with cheap internet calls. We will fight for every customer by offering our own attractive prices for these calls. And with BT Communicator you can make the same call at a BT Openzone hotspot when you are out and about.

“Unlike traditional telephony, where we are heavily regulated, for internet telephony we can compete on an equal basis and offer customers the same advantages of low cost calls over the internet, but from a global, trusted brand.

“But customers need more than just cheap prices and we are confident that we can provide them with top quality calls with excellent customer service.”

From October 3, calls to 30 popular international destinations with BT Communicator, such as the United States, Australia, Spain and France will cost just 0.5p a minute. A 60 minute call to a US landline, which would cost 72p with Skype, would cost only 30p with BT.

With BT Communicator the cost is charged to your usual BT phone bill, whereas you would have to buy pre-paid credit with Skype. And BT uses their telephony experience to prioritise internet calls and ensure they are top quality.

Patterson added: “We believe voice calls over the internet are going to become much more prevalent in the future. There’s been a lot written about this being a threat to BT, but actually we see it as a great opportunity to offer customers a range of exciting new services in the future, like video calls and combining voice with text at the same time.

“This latest offer will be going out on email to millions of BT customers to try to encourage them to download the free BT Communicator with Yahoo! Messenger software and start making high quality cheap and easy calls.”

The Sunday Times Fast Track 100 tracks Britain's top-performing private companies and entrepreneurs on an annual basis. The category of Tech Track 100 ranks Britain's fastest growing technology companies based on sales growth over the last two years.

Daisy has experienced phenomenal growth over the past two years with figures of 458% annual growth from 2002 - 2004.

Daisy CEO Matthew Riley commented, “The company has produced unprecedented results in the four years we have been trading.

We are growing at a phenomenal rate and anticipate this year’s success to be even better than previous years. Our 2004 sales forecast was expected to take us through to 2007, but we met it in less than a year. Our number of employees has increased in line with our growth from just 12 employees in 2003 to 117 today, a trend we intend to continue in the future.

Daisy was built with a vision of delivering quality service, innovation, choice, and low prices to businesses across the UK. We can empower UK businesses to achieve their objectives with the aid of the technology based services that we are able to offer.

The award is by far our most prestigious yet. Everyone at daisy has contributed to the success and we are all delighted to be named as the fastest growing technology company in the country. We are looking forward to another record breaking year.”