Lord of the ringtones gets ready to reign
By Sophie Barker

PERHAPS appropriately for someone who began his career in Polyfilla, "solid" is how most observers describe Peter Erskine, the former BT Cellnet boss who will find himself at the head of a FTSE 100 company later this year.

The Liverpool University graduate worked at Colgate Palmolive and then Mars before deserting consumer goods to move into the nascent mobile phone sector.

He joined one of the original "personal communication networks"; it went on to become One2One. Three years later he rang BT's number, moving into the mobile phone division and eventually heading BT Cellnet.

Erskine is widely acknowledged to have injected some business nous into the troubled Cellnet.

Although he failed to overtake Vodafone as the leading mobile network, Erskine was behind the launch of Genie, the mobile internet service which is still ahead of Vodafone's equivalent.

After eight years behind the scenes at the BT behemoth, Erskine has no public profile to speak of. One observer commented that "he is a switched-on businessman, but he's not going to set the world on fire". Hopefully he will fill in a few cracks.