Grabbed Beam Radio

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 676, 30 May 1929, Page 9

Grabbed Beam Radio

STATE’S COUP RECALLED Cable Companies Approve Merger (Australian and N.Z. Press Association) (United Service) Received 11 a.m. LONDON, Wednesday. AT a meeting' of Marconis Wireless Telegraph Company, Lord Inverforth, presiding, recalled that the Government took the exploitation of the Imperial beam wireless out of the hands of the company which invented and developed the system and made it a Post Office monopoly.

The Government licence to the Marconi Company excluded its participation in wireless telegraphy to the rest °t Empire. In the circumstances, the only revenue the company could hope to derive from the beam service was the royalty of per cent, on the gross traffic. It had also become certain that as the Marconi foreign services developed the cable companies would not sit quietly under wireless competition, but embark on a rate war w’liich would certainly have reduced their revenue, and w’hich would have even more damaging to the Marconi Company. Lord Inverforth said he believed tha t I he establishment of one comprehensive system of Imperial communications would form a landmark in the history of world communications.

Resolutions authorising the cableradio merger were carried unanimously. At a meeting of the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company, Mr. John Denison-Pender said: "The invention of the beam wireless has resulted in the establishment by the British Government of beam -wireless communication, in competition with our most remunerative fields of telegraphic correspondence. If we reduced the cable rates to the wireless rates and recovered the traffic previously lost to the beam, the Government would reduce the rates still further.”

The resolutions for the Imperial Communications Merger were carried.