LONDON (AFX) - British Telecommunications PLC is establishing a broadband data triangle in a bid to support UK business start-ups and to underpin funding from U.S. blue chips such as Cisco Systems and Motorola Inc, according to BT chief technologist Peter Cochrane, who also holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at Bristol University.

Cochrane is coordinating a major U.S./UK business-to-business venture capital conference later this year which will be attended by U.S. technology investors. He has provisionally lined up UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for a keynote address and sees the construction of the data network as vital to the UK gaining a foothold in a global data network.

"There are hundreds of start-ups, hundreds of small companies in the London, Cambridge, Ipswich triangle that need money and good funding and they need markets and the objective here is to bring that capability in," Cochrane said in an interview with AFX News.

He said that the data triangle between the three cities will carry multimedia content at increased speed, it is currently running at up to 10 gigabytes a second.

He believes that the data triangle will help link up, and prove attractive to, the hundreds of small start-up companies looking for high-speed telecommunications, media and technology infrastructure access to support their new businesses.

There are sub £10 mln companies involved in this that could become £100 mln companies, said Cochrane.

Some of these start-up companies are likely to base themselves at Adastral Park in Ipswich. Cochrane said that Corning Glass has just moved into a site at the park and that ERA are also moving 200 people into the park.

The September venture capital conference that Cochrane is putting together will be sponsored by BT and he expects executives from Cisco Systems, Motorola, Compaq Computer Corp., Xerox Corp., and Easyjet to attend.

The U.S. ambassador to the UK and Patricia Hewitt, minister for small business and e-commerce, are expected to attend and Cochrane hopes the conference will be a "catalyst" for new U.S. investment into the UK.

"I'm just bringing the people together, what is wrong in Europe is that venture capitalists want to drip feed you 100,000 pounds a time and they want sixty percent of the company," said Cochrane.

He said that U.S. venture capitalists do not set such stifling investment terms compared to their European counterparts and they have more interest in start-ups becoming a success.

Cochrane envisages the UK data triangle eventually becoming part of a worldwide data loop within a twenty four seven (twenty four hours a day seven days a week) economy."

"If your going to have a twenty four seven economy you can't do it from one country, the work has to rotate around the planet and the obvious thing is to put some stuff from the UK into Europe and southeast Asia so that companies can rotate the work around, it's that kind of vision," said Cochrane.

He stressed that optical fibre cabling is being laid across the Atlantic and in the U.S. with this aim in mind.

"All the infrastructure is going in, so it is the right time to start the first footprint, if it (the data triangle) is successful we can start looking at whether we can repeat this footprint out into the west country, up into the east Midlands and up into the northwest," said Cochrane.

He said that everywhere you look in the UK their are great ideas, but insufficient funds and he sees U.S. money helping underpin the growth of traffic on the UK loop, with its potential to tap into a global loop.

At the British Chambers of Commerce conference earlier this month, Cochrane said the future business development of the internet is about access, not copyright, and telecommunications companies are likely to share infrastructure, such as transmitters, much more in coming years.

Cochrane also stressed that the customer-to-customer field is being largely ignored despite the strong growing demand for services like mobile telephone SMS (Short Messaging Service)text messaging.

He believes there is "no limit to the amount of interaction we will pay for, and it (the evolving dot.com world) is a high margin world."