Incumbent telcos will not survive much longer unless they wake up to the new communications economy being fostered by the Internet, BT's chief technologist Professor Peter Cochrane told a gathering of telecoms executives in London on Tuesday.

"The old-style telecoms companies will not be able to cope with a world where users get exponentially more [bandwidth] for exponentially less [money] unless they change very quickly," Cochrane told his audience at the Beyond Networks conference organized by UK-based consultancy Analysys.

He admitted that some parts of BT understood the new dynamics but that there were divisions that didn't "get it" - "I'm working hard on the bits of the company that don't," he said. Cochrane added that he didn't believe any telco or cable company fully understood the opportunity and how they needed to adapt.

Having taken a side-swipe at governments and regulators - "They have no positive contribution to make" - and consigned SDH/Sonet and ATM to the technology scrap heap - "Now it's all about IP over WDM" - Cochrane stated that BT should be "carved up into five separate bits. The sum total of the bits is far greater than that of the whole."

However, his BT colleague Sally Davis was more cautious about the break-up of the company. Davis, BT's director, group Internet and multimedia, posed a rhetorical question to the conference: "With Internet assets so fundamental to any incumbent's business, can we really afford to spin off that part of the business?"