Biographical note

Peter Culham has spent his career as a Government economist. He joined the GES as an Economic Assistant in 1979, starting in the Department of Transport. He then worked in the Department of the Environment, Transport again and then the Ministry of Defence before joining Oftel as an Economic Adviser in 1986. He was promoted to Senior Economist in 1990 and has been Oftel’s Chief Economist since 1998.

During his time at Oftel, he has been involved in a large number of regulatory developments including:

• a number of price control reviews of BT;
• the development of interconnection arrangements and charges;
• Oftel’s approach to non-discrimination (ie to ensure that BT’s behaviour in retail markets is fair despite its position as the main provider of key parts of the telecoms infrastructure);
• the liberalisation of the market for international calls;
• reviews of mobile termination charges, and
• a review of NTL’s charges for broadcast services to ITV.