OFTEL recently held an emergency meeting that was reported as successful in tackling the problem of Telco's not taking up the opportunity for gaining access to BT's exchanges as part of the unbundling process, has still not attracted Kingston Communications.

Kingston Communications slated the process by stating that delays and problems still mean that operators will not be able to realistically deliver ADSL nationally this year. Kingston are not however, abandoning unbundling completely as they intend to launch a national rollout of ADSL in the spring of next year.

Kingston also stated that the unbundling process in the UK has not been organised enough to allow operators to offer this service in 2001. Not enough exchanges are in the same area, thus making the service delivery difficult.

At this moment there is only one operator in the UK offering an unbundled service and only four exchanges ready for competing telco's to gain access to them. BT have agreed to open up 600 of it's 6000 exchanges by the summer.

Kingston Communications are only 1 of 9 operators who have now withdrawn from the process which originally had 28 telcos signing up to offer services.