Later that year, a Wall Street contact arranged a meeting with Philip Anschutz, a reclusive tycoon who had sold Southern Pacific Railroad to Union Pacific and, in a stroke of genius, kept the right to lay fibre-optic cable along the tracks of both railways.
Another possibility, much discussed within the Treasury, would be a government-sponsored effort to encourage the private sector to lay state-of-the art fibre-optic cable in one or more of Britain's major cities.