Lord Carter joins telecoms supplier

Lord Stephen Carter, who resigned from the government last summer after delivering his Digital Britain report and white paper, is joining Alcatel, Lucent, the Franco-American global telecoms supplier. His new job sees him become the company's director of marketing, strategy and communications. He will be relocating from London to headquarters in Paris. The company's chief executive, who recruited him, is Ben Verwayen, the former head of BT. Carter was the founding chief executive of the communications regulator Ofcom between 2002-2006, and in that position led tense negotiations with BT, over local loop unbundling, accelerating the spread of broadband through competition. After leaving Ofcom Carter worked briefly for the financial PR company, Brunswick. He then moved, again briefly, to assist Gordon Brown at Number Ten, which proved an uncomfortable brief. He was then granted a peerage, and put in charge of the Digital Britain project, with offices at the Department of Business & Regulatory Reform, under Lord Mandelson, and the Department of Culture Media & Sport. He was tasked to create the framework for a fast broadband and networked British economy and society of the future. But he is widely judged to have damaged his standing by resigning as soon as the controversial report was delivered, rather than seeing it through the testing legislative process. The digital economy bill is currently mired by disputes at the House of Lords committee stage, with opponents lined up against a number of its proposals, including an annual £6 levy on phone lines to pay for the extension of broadband to rural areas; concerns over copyright protection, including powers to cut off broadband to serial offenders; severe Conservative opposition to three publicly funded regional news pilots, and their additional belief that BT needs to be forced to open up its ducts to rivals, so they can lay superfast fibre. • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email [email protected] or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. • If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".