Speaker Biography
Malcolm J Matson
President
The OPLAN Foundation
Malcolm is an entrepreneur in the telecoms and IT sectors. In the early 1980’s he was a pioneer of the UK cable TV industry and eventually sold his interests to the US RBOC, Pacific Telesis. He then formed COLT Telecoms and managed the business through to it being granted the third UK telecoms license and becoming Europe’s first all-fibre public network. Malcolm served for many years on the UK Parliamentary Information Technology Committee, has had significant input to IT public policy and since the mid 1980s has developed the concept of the OPLAN (open public local access network) as the “4th Utility”. In 2005 he set up the OPLAN foundation (www.oplan.org) as a not-for-profit body promoting the ‘open access’ concept and acting as a meta-community for OPLANs around the world. The OPLAN Foundation has undertaken a major advisory project for the World Bank on the relevance of the ‘local open access’ model for the developing world.
He was educated at the University of Nottingham, Trinity College of Music and the Harvard Business School (MBA ‘72). He is an advisor to various European cities developing their own OPLAN strategy and has written widely on the topic for bodies such as the Institute of Economic Affairs (of which he is a patron) and the Technical University, Delft, Netherlands.
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