Cut off: Big government IT wallets snap shut on BT's fingers BT, which until 1984 was part of the UK public sector, is losing its grip on the public purse. Spending with BT by the Department of Health and its organisations appears to have fallen by nearly two-thirds during the current fiscal year, compared with 2015-16. Data unearthed by The Register has found BT is also rapidly …
it can go back to being government owned, they have paid for most things BT have been doing for 10 years anyway
the government would have full control over the business structure and bosses saleries and bonuses
if the bosses fail to meet targets and try any monopoly dealings, they won't be getting a penny bonus
good, the sooner BT become bankrupt the better
Not really, there's a 'crown guarantee' on their horribly-in-deficit pension scheme that will have tax payers picking up bill if BT go TITSUP. Something to do with it having once been a public utility although somehow the guarantee also covers post-privatisation joiners which is great if you're a BT employee (which most of us aren't) but not so good if you're a tax payer (which most of us are).
I'd rather it were simply renationalised.
The privatised version of BT is an abomination, sucking at the taxpayers' tit on the one hand, while making billions in profit on the other, and meanwhile its prices continue to skyrocket, despite those obscenely vast profits.
As a personal example, I'm forced to have a BT phone line that I never actually use, for the sake of a pitiful 3 - 5 Mb/s ADSL connection (on a good day), and for the privilege of merely "renting the line", making exactly no calls ever, and receiving a trickle of data off the Internet, I'm expected to pay over £50 a month. Last year that same service cost me £40. Three years ago it cost just over £30.
BT is an object lesson in everything wrong with privatisation.
Unfortunately you are not just paying for your line, you are also paying for every telephone box around the country, although I don't know how many there still are. You are also subsidising BT TV. You are also paying for 2G and 3G networks that BT bid for when Cellnet was on the go, but were virtually given away to help the sale of mmo2. .
At privatisation, BT was banned from competing with the fledgling BSKYB, and also had a requirement to maintain all telephone boxes around the country (apart from Hull).
Competing with BSKYB would have been good because it would have kept Mr Murdoch in check. But to catchup many years later, BT's had to throw money at their TV service so I guess you are subsidising those costs. Telephone boxes have never made a profit and presumably make even less now.
Yes, in other words I'm paying for a lot of junk that I never use, including PSTN/POTS.
The private sector should operate like the private sector, charging only for the actual product sold, not like a sort of corporate welfare state, charging a "tax" for its speculative ventures.
"The private sector should operate like the private sector, charging only for the actual product sold, not like a sort of corporate welfare state, charging a "tax" for its speculative ventures."
Eh? That's exactly how pretty much every business operates and always has done. You pay for something, they make a profit and spend it on something else, eg advertising, R&D, acquiring other companies, a new yacht for the MD, whatever they hell they like.
Ever bought anything from Amazon? They are "wasting" some of your money on playing with drones and messing about with AI cars that have sweet FA to do with your purchase from them.
"the sale of mmo2"
Touch of the alt news here. BT split. If you had n shares of BT you woke up next morning wiht n shares of BT, now worth something less, and n shares of MMO2.
Repeat after me: "BT did not sell MMO2"
After some time as an independent company MMO2 was taken over by Telefonica.
AFAICT the reason for the split was that BT thought that the licence bidding was too rich. It was a typical piece of BT management's thinking. It ended, of course, with them having to pay out a huge chunk of cash to buy themselves back into the market and still ended up being 12% owned by Deutsch Telekom.
As a personal example, I'm forced to have a BT phone line that I never actually use, for the sake of a pitiful 3 - 5 Mb/s ADSL connection (on a good day), and for the privilege of merely "renting the line", making exactly no calls ever, and receiving a trickle of data off the Internet, I'm expected to pay over £50 a month. Last year that same service cost me £40. Three years ago it cost just over £30.
Are you completely sure about those figures; you seem to be paying more for your ADSL than I do for VDSL (FTTC) which is giving me a speed faster than yours by a factor of 10.
They never based pricing on what would give a reasonable return, but on what they thought the customer would pay.
ISTR that BT made the same mistake over 20 years ago when the contract it had with the BBC for television circuits around the country was up for renewal. I didn't see the figures but IIRC Energis (remember them?) undercut them by some large margin. Mind you I don't think that ended particularly well...
Telephone boxes have never made a profit and presumably make even less now. And they are slowly but surely being withdrawn; a few near us must have cost more to empty of cash than was actually in them. Having said that BT had to provide them as a public service for emergency use but the ascendency of the mobile phone rendered them ever less necessary, and continues to do so. Yes we did / still do have to subsidise them, but it does no harm to think of that as some sort of insurance policy to guarantee being able to get help in an emergency.
Not really, I bet a lot of pension providers have shares in BT and it is too big to fail. Do you really want Whitehall mandarins with no accountability trying to run your telecoms?
Having worked for a subsidiary of BT GS, it's no wonder they've lost a lot of their NHS contracts. They never based pricing on what would give a reasonable return, but on what they thought the customer would pay. For example, having worked on the NHSmail bid, BT GS wanted to charge £200m just for MS Exchange servers, without the service and support costs. When the competition came in at a total price of £50m , I asked BT GS to re-evaluate the MS Exchange costs. A day later, they came back with a cost of £100m. How can you halve a quote in 24hours and be taken seriously?
BT would'nt be government owned, the network would be owned by the government and BT would have to buy wholesale like all other telecoms, while ISP's would'nt have to charge all customers the BT line rental, the ISP's could charge any line rental they could afford because they would be buying off of the government
BT would still exist like back in the 1980's before they brought the network of the government as a private telecom but they would soon be out of business without owning the network and probably have under 1000 customers
"BT did point to the two-year extension of its Unicorn network deal with Surrey County Council"
The unicorn has been found to be a horse with a horn made out of cardboard stuck to it's head, also, the horse was dead. However, due to the way the contract was worded, BT will be getting their £1.5M bonus payment.
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To be fair, they seem to have been demonstrating their European credentials by a whole-hearted commitment to the Italian way of doing business.
If that sounds a bit unkind, I should just mention that my attempt years ago to wangle a job with my then company's Italian subsidiary in a nice suburb of a northern city foundered when the MD went to prison for corporate tax evasion. What amazed people was that he got prosecuted.
Many years ago, I had the 'pleasure' of reviewing tender documents from BT and have met with their staff in the past. Let's just say I was not impressed, they were so out of touch it was unreal!
Terrible tender submissions, riddled with errors, way too confident about themselves, and their arrogant staff weren't much better either! They were more interested in grabbing as much business as possible without delivering the most appropriate solution that we wanted at a sensible price.
It seems they haven't learnt anything over the years, so it's no surprise they are in the state they are in.
This is not BT winning less business. This is BT walking away from government projects and ICT in general. Gav has made it clear from his actions the money (and investment) is to be made in content and consumer spending. The days of BT holding large PS contracts are gone, well apart from the ones that are not published here and never will be. As for the usual suspects passing and moaning about paying for their line when they don't use it or paying for a remote exchange that has nothing to do with their lives I say suck it up. There are no national telcos globally that have this sorted out in a way their customers are happy about it.
"This is BT walking away from government projects and ICT in general".
Yep, BT regularly walk away when they know it will potentially leave a sort of Ransomware type situation, where it is very likely a Council will have to concede defeat and renegotiate with BT.
Just look at all the BDUK contracts, all won by BT. That was then, this is now. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
This isn't commercial sense taking hold of BT decision making, its the incumbent bullying Councils into submission and thankfully, its no longer working as well as it did.
Devon and Somerset Council showed a real technical understanding of the issues, rejecting BT's technical proposal for rural Broadband rollout, with a good understanding that FTTC/Pointless G.fast (vapourware at the time) just didn't provide a thorough comprehensive solution in those rural hamlet situations.
The biggest disparities will be for the rural folk living either side of this contract area connected to existing BT lines, because its going to really show up how bad BT contracts really are, in terms of value for money.
The neighbour over the hill in the Gigaclear area with a potential 50Mbps/1Gbps tiered offering true FTTP, compared with the only option to pay for a USO of 10Mbps at the end of a very long copper line for those left with no choice but BT.
Ofcom too little, too late - lax as usual, the regulated USO of 10Mbps is going to be a damp squib, pointless exercise, for those remaining 5-10% of the UK. It's a pointless token gesture at best.
You could do the same for far less and quicker, having an 'overnight change' of a mandatory policy of bonding any unused copper cores for such customers to provide a maximum possible Broadband connection speed with what's available to that line.
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