See Tymshare for an example of a timeshare services company that spun off Tymnet as a data communications specialist with a complex product portfolio.
Therefore, the notion of "value-added network services" was established to allow for operation of such private businesses as an exemption from state control.
The telecommunication operator sector was marketed in the USA in 1982 (see Modification of Final Judgment) and in the United Kingdom starting with the early 1980s (mainly due to the privatization of British Telecom under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher).
[1] On a multinational scale, and due to the heterogeneous telecommunication economy and infrastructure before the market penetration of the Internet, management of a value-added network service proved a complicated task leading to the idea of user-defined networks,[2] a concept preceding the nowadays ubiquitous availability of internet service.
In the absence of state-operated telecommunication sector, value-added network services are still used, mainly as a functional description, in conjunction with dedicated leased lines for business-to-business communications (especially for EDIFACT data transfer).