Small broadband firms aren't fussed about getting access to BT's ducts and poles Ofcom's move to open up BT's ducts and poles to competitors is the cornerstone of the regulator's strategy to break the country's reliance on the former state monopoly, but small fibre firms say they are not holding their breath. In February the regulator announced plans to open up BT's Openreach infrastructure to competitors …
You mean Kingston Communications, then KC, now KCOM?
On the whole I do prefer them, yes they still exist, there is no BT, the only problem is you have no choice over broadband provider (over fibre/adsl) and no real access to things you can get on a BT line such as BT Sport.
Rollout of fibre is a bit slow but they are doing fibre to premise.
"Rollout of fibre is a bit slow but they are doing fibre to premise".
If there were a war on,there would be a requisition order to get it sorted....yesterday,job done.
This country is screwed, inside or outside of the EU,any other country deeming it necessary would implement the action required to do things & move on to the next item.
'Politicians',I SHIT on them ALL.
"If there were a war on,there would be a requisition order to get it sorted....yesterday,job done."
I'm sure BT would love your advice on how to do this.
How many households?
How many hours per household (ALL of them, not just the easy ones)?
How many skilled people are available?
From that you should be able to work out how long it will take in the real world. Or do you have a reserve army of installers you can call on? And if you're going to recruit an extra army what are the costs of making them redundant?
Now let's have a look at the capital needed.
How much plant for trenching?
How much fibre?
How many customer units at what price?
How much extra equipment at the network core and at what price?
What's the total come to?
Where are you going to borrow it, at what terms over what period?
Divide the annual cost of borrowing and repayment and tell us whether you think it works out at a price the customers will pay. If the take-up isn't sufficient how do you stop the entire business going down the tubes? Re-nationalise it to pick up the debt at the taxpayer's expense?
Yes, it's easy to type "get a requisition order". That's the PHB view of things.
"Where are you going to borrow it, at what terms over what period?"
Is there a law which says they must pay out £££millions in share dividends every years and huge bonuses or could they begin by acting like a startup (or Apple for that matter) and instead of paying the divi/bonuses, re-invest it all back into the business for at least a few years.
"Is there a law which says they must pay out £££millions in share dividends every years "
In effect, yes. The directors of a public limited company have a duty in law to act in the interests of the shareholders (who are, after all the owners). They are also ultimately answerable to the shareholders who own the business via the AGM. That means any investment has to be assessed to be commercially viable. That is produce a return for the shareholders. At some point in
The idea that a company the size of BT can be treated as a startup (overall), is simply ludicrous. The OR side is not, by regulatory action, a "growth business". It's got a turnover of about £5bn, of which about half is line rental, perhaps 10% is GEA-FTTC (or VDSL2) and the rest is mostly private circuits. The line rental price is heavily regulated (and reducing) and the GEA-FTTC product is currently up for review to impose regulatory pricing. Private circuits are heavily price regulated too. There is also likely to be the imposition of a heavily regulated "dark" fibre product in certain areas plus another heavily regulated passive infrastructure (poles & ducts) product. So that core network that you suggest BT pours money into is heavily regulated, has very little room for revenue growth. Current capex is around £1.2bn, and it's very difficult to make a commercial case for vast increases in that amount.
The rest of BT is rather less heavily regulated (which is why you see BT Consumer growing and money being put into that (Sports Rights, bundles and so on). It's also partly why the purchase of EE has gone ahead, a much less heavily regulated industry where there is more prospect of a return for major capital expenditure. There may be smaller parts of the business that also merit higher investment if growth prospects are good, but that's not going to change the big picture.
Finally, shareholders buy into companies for two main reasons. One is yield. Solid, mature blue-chip utilities are expected to produce a yield (the directors get sacked if they don't). Where do you think the likes of investment trusts and pensions get their income? They rely on the likes of BT for that (and used to rely on oil companies and banks too). It's reduction in returns and yields which is partly responsible for pension deficits which hit private and public schemes together (or at least the funded ones).
The second reason is capital growth. A mature company simply can't grow at the rate of a start-up. That's simply because when it has a very large share of a market there isn't the room to grow. Some grow by take-over (witness BT taking over EE), but as that dilutes shareholdings and/or involves more borrowing it dilutes returns unless there are significant synergies (like mutual cost reductions).
So this simplistic quoting of "investment" without consideration for return is never going to work. If shareholders simply see money disappearing into capital investment and their dividend being cut without seeing a chance of getting a return they will simply stop it happening.
"In effect, yes. The directors of a public limited company have a duty in law to act in the interests of the shareholders (who are, after all the owners). They are also ultimately answerable to the shareholders who own the business via the AGM. That means any investment has to be assessed to be commercially viable. That is produce a return for the shareholders. At some point in"
Thanks foir the comprehensive (and understandable!!) explanation. it's far from my area expertees :-)
My real point I suppose is that short term gains are not always in the best interests of the company or the shareholders in the long term. To my inexpert eye it seems that many companies live and die by the short term share price value and size of the dividends, probably caused by high speed trading and the impression so many people seem to have these days that share values will always go up. Likewise, any results not meeting the expectations of analysts must be a bad thing, even if profits did rise as seen by dips in even Apples share price when they made huge profits, but not as huge as the analysts predicted.
I've said it before but I'll say it again.
The British broadband infrastructure should be treated in the same way as setting up the National Grid in the '30s. Do it properly once rather, than the current system (mainly FTTC) which will require replacing in a few years time. FTTP should be the standard installation for all except those isolated locations where it is not physically possible.
Who knows what speed will be required in the future. Over the last 20 years I have gone from 56K dial up, to ISDN, ADSL and now FTTC. I only get 10 meg but it's enough, at the moment, for our two adult household as the main use is browsing and steaming catchup TV (e.g. BBC iPlayer).
People tend to forget that BT is still heavily leaching taxpayers' money via BDUK, which is what entitles the government to continue dictating who has access to "BT's" infrastructure, since in reality it still belongs to the taxpayer, in the very current statement of accounts sense, not just in the historical investments sense.
This public investment then contributes to BT's £3.5 billion in very private profits per annum, most of which lines the pockets of a comparatively small number of private capitalists, so I really don't think they have much to whine about, indeed the taxpayers have a far more legitimate cause for complaint, as it's their money which is being appropriated to fund this profiteering.
Stigmatising BT as a "former state monopoly" belies the fact that the taxpayers were and still are entitled to that "monopoly", and that in terms of prices, infrastructure development and service, we were actually much better off when the network we paid (and are still paying) for lay entirely under our control, purely for our benefit, not for the benefit of an elite gang of obscenely wealthy corporate welfare scroungers.
we were actually much better off when the network we paid (and are still paying) for lay entirely under our control
The hell we were.
Nice R&D department, naff all chance of funding from government to actually deploy anything. Party lines abounded. You could have any telephone you wanted as long as you rented it from the GPO and didn't mind the limited range of choice. You could get an engaged tone as soon as you finished dialling the area code. Call costs were painful. Calls were unreliable. Call quality was often poor.
I don't want to be accused of being a BT 'fanboi' but I don't see how anyone old enough to remember the network before BT took over could possibly advocate going back to that way of running things.
And even if you aren't old enough to remember the GPO shambles - why would anyone think that handing control of the UK's telecommunications network to a government organisation would be a good idea? Is there any large IT project that they have managed successfully? And do we really want Theresa May and her ilk getting their hands even more firmly stuck into things?
The lack of funding from government (when I was in BT at Martlesham) seemed to be designed to make it ready for privatisation i.e. make the organisation seem bad by depriving it of funding and also con potential shareholders about how much the business really cost to run.
As for party lines - I'd be happy with party fibre lines rather than the current brilliant move of making me FTTC by designating some box by the exchange 6 miles away rather than the cabinet they wire me up to two miles away.
"we were actually much better off when the network we paid (and are still paying) for lay entirely under our control"
That was primarily POTS terminating in black telephones - when your turn came round. Why? Because there wasn't enough money to invest to get it up to scratch.
He added: "As a network owner and builder, I do have some sympathy for BT. When you have responsibility for delivering services to everyone on the network there is a slight concern if you have to open up the network to others. There is always an operational fear of what happens if they damage the network."
If that is the case then maybe BT / Openreach could actually work with other provders to implement this.
I however suspect that this would be out of the box thinking for BT / Openreach and therefore not something they have considered or would every consider.
"It is cheaper to build from scratch than to use bt ancient ducts and poles. the red tape, the time wasted and the excess charges make it un economic."
Only because BT make it that way.
Look to New Zealand to see what happens when the telco and the lineso get split up and the handbrake on contact with "externals" gets removed.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it's not a massive undertaking to replace the local loop from the FTTC, as BT have committed to going down the SIP/or similar in the near future it won't matter what the local loop consists of and is going to happen overtime.
Having worked for a major player the market, the majority of customers don't want FTTC or FTTP they want cheap and cheerful ADSL even when advised the product isn't good enough for the requirements.
The amount of times my sales team would recommend FTTC as the customer had 4+ users in the property, had something like 8-10 devices running at any one time but they'd not spend the money on 80/20 or even 40/10 and end up sharing a paltry 4Mb on ADSL and missing out.
The advent of G'fast will prove a disruptive technology at least for awhile and give BT time to decide what when to replace the LL...
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