Comment: Speculate to accumulate

BT gets a real bashing in the press and industry and in my opinion, often deservedly so. But there is a side to BT that draws less attention, and consequently, receives far less credit than it deserves.

I'm talking about BTexact, based at Adastral Park, formerly called Martlesham Labs. The division is responsible for a great deal of innovation, and has played a large part in the patents that BT now owns. It has 150 inventions to its name in the past year, and these have helped push BT's number of patents to approaching 15,000.

It has 3,000 technologists working on ideas and links with some of the top British universities. An incubator arm has spun out five companies. To date, just one of those has failed, with the others experiencing varying degrees of success.

I'll put aside the obvious thought when presented with this knowledge: that if BTexact can be so forward thinking, so innovative and so determined to develop close links with academia, and thus attract the cream of engineering talent, why are other parts seemingly so backwards in thought? Why are we reduced to campaigns to improve broadband usage in the UK

and why do we see so many complaints by competitors about its tactics?

Last month, BTexact announced that Microwave Photonics had joined its Brightstar incubator. As part of BTexact, it developed optical wireless gateways. Dubbed Green Radio, it converts light in an optical fibre into a radio signal without any electronics. It does so without any moving parts, and can receive as well as transmit signals. It is aimed firmly at the wireless Lan market, including 802.11 products, and means base stations are powered by just the light in optical fibre. Their advantage is that they work across protocols and handle data rates up to 40GHz.

Impressive stuff, but the downside of all this is that a great British invention is heading Stateside. BT has found that UK investors simply don't have the stomach for taking risks at the moment, especially with leading-edge technologies. So, just as in the early 1990s and before, BT has had to turn to the US for the extra funding it needs to invest in the technology's future.

We made great strides during the late 1990s to become the second home for technology investment, but the dotcom fallout has supressed our appetite.

There's nothing wrong with the 'not invented here' tag, or foreign investment in British ideas, but I hope this is a temporary licking of wounds. My fear is that if we continue to see more inventions heading abroad, it will eventually leak down to the technologists themselves, and we will once again see the brain drain as talent heads elsewhere.

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