dwight@ibmpcug.co.uk (Dwight Ernest) (11/22/90)
Formation of the UK Internet Consortium London, 21 November 1990 Following years of mostly unfocused frustration about the lack of clear direction in the UK networking community toward the creation of a UK Internet, a group calling itself the UK Internet Consortium has been formed in the last few weeks. The group intends to either provide or to press for the timely and reasonable provision to UK customers of a network with connections to continental and inter- national Internets running the TCP/IP protocol suite. Consortium members said that the emphasis would be on UK management, UK-based service availability, reasonable prices, and cooperation with other network providers. All agreed that in the current climate of telecommunications deregulation, the time was ripe. Founding consortium members included representatives from the following UK firms: Unipalm Ltd., a Cambridge firm offering TCP/IP-based communications software; The Independent, a quality daily newspaper; Spider Systems Ltd., an Edinburgh-based company offering networking equipment; the Desktop Connection, a Manchester- based desktop publishing vendor and service provider; and Specialix Ltd., who design and manufacture third-party communi- cations equipment for the PC aftermarket. Both the Sun UK Users Group and the IBM PC Users Group were also represented, as were several private individuals with background and skills in computer networking. The consortium says it will be distributing a survey to gauge market potential and emphasized that all consortium members had signed an affidavit to the effect that responses would not be misused. They said that all aspects of the Data Protection Act would be strictly adhered to in the collection of responses. Approximately 30,000 survey copies would be printed, and they will be distributed through users groups mailings and company promotional mailings. Additionally, they said that surveys may be requested by sending email to ip-interest@independent.uucp or by posting a request to The UK Internet Consortium PO Box 360 Harrow HA1 4LQ They also mentioned that an electronic mailing list to facilitate discussion of the issues has been created. They have asked for subscription requests to be sent to ukipnet-request@independent.uucp -30- Please do not reply to the poster of this message, but to the ukipnet-request@independent.uucp address instead. -- Automatic Disclaimer: The views expressed above are those of the author alone and may not represent the views of the IBM PC User Group. -- --Dwight Ernest (reply to dwight%independent.uucp@ukc.ac.uk)