Very few people outside the city seem to have noticed, which speaks volumes for the standing in which it is held, but a suspected arson attack on one of British Telecommunications Plc’s exchanges on Sunday has wiped out all telephone services including 999 calls for 13,000 subscribers in Liverpool: a further 12,000, on linked exchanges have a limited local-call service and the company says that it will take up to a week for repairs to be completed; the priority is to restore payphone and emergency services; the company denied that the large number of outages had been caused by the policy of consolidating formerly separate local exchanges into larger, central digital units.
