I don't know how you could give telecom as an example and which sector of telecom you are talking about.
If you are talking about telecom manufacturer, I can give you a list of big names as indicted none of them are from the UK.
Ericsson (Sweden), Nokia-Siemens (Finland), Alcatel-Lucent (France), Huwei (China), Motorola (US), Nortel (Canada), ZTE (China),
Cisco (US), Juniper (US)
If you are talking about service providers, I can't argue as you cannot move the employment abroad. However, you need to bear in mind that
Almost all mobile companies are owned by the foreigners. Orange is owned by the French, O2 by the Spanish, T-mobile by the Germans and 3 by the Chinese in Hongkong. So what you are left are just BT as the fixline and broadband wholesale provider and Vodafone headquartered in the UK. I give you another quote of BT £10billon investment of its 21CN project. The strategic vendors are
• Fujitsu and Huawei have been chosen in the access domain which will link BT's existing access network with the new 21CN
• Alcatel, Cisco and Siemens have been selected as preferred suppliers for metro nodes which provide routing and signaling for 21CN's voice, data and video services
• Cisco and Lucent will be 21CN's preferred suppliers for core nodes providing high capacity and cost efficient connections between metro nodes
• Ericsson has been selected in the i-node domain, in essence the intelligence that controls the services
• Ciena and Huawei have been chosen in the transmission domain to supply the optical electronics that will convert the signals carried at high capacity over the cables connecting the metro and core nodes
Given these facts, I don't know how you could reach the conclusion that the telecom industry in the UK is standing out in the global competition and which part makes you so pound?