Concert Communications Services

Concert Communications Services was a $1 billion joint venture, originally launched June 1994 by BT Group and MCI Communications. Portugal Telecom became a partner in 1997.

Concert was the first multi-service global end-to-end telecommunications provider, which broke the global national telecom monopoly on both international and in-country services. Its aim was to provide single deliverer end-to-end connectivity to multinational corporations. Its speed of global service coverage and availability was gained by leasing bandwidth from national telecoms companies, unlike competitors like FLAG or Global Crossing who physically laid cables in oceans, roads and pavements.

After the breakdown of the BT/MCI relationship, it became a joint venture between BT and AT&T in 1999. After BT and AT&T's relationship broke down in 2001, Concert's assets were split between the two parties and merged into their regional operations in 2002.

In 1992, Sir Iain Vallance's SCOOP project in BT (later called Project Sovereign ), objective was to rid the organisation of its Civil Service culture, and create a strategy to develop to create a global-level competitive group. This needed two deliverables in the business plan:

Concert was developed to address the second deliverable - the conductor of global business. It was recognised in the strategy for Concert, that the organisation (i.e. - BT and Concert combined) could not own the world - nor would it want to, as some markets may be key to certain customers, but not to the overall strategy. Secondly, the regulation of global communications was broken down into both national, regional and global based regulators - to address them all would be highly complex, but most importantly slow rollout speed of the service. Resultantly, Concert had to be seen to be an independent organisation of its founder BT.

It was decided to locate Concerts global HQ in North America, the largest global telecommunications market. Reston, Virginia was chosen as it was both easily accessible from Europe, and sat in the then developing telecommunications and technology corridor of Northern Virginia. Concert started building its Global network in 1993; unlike its competitors FLAG and COLT who physically built their network using their own assets, Concert grew rapidly by purchasing capacity from other TelCo's.

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