BT’s 12-month rollercoaster ride

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BT has had an interesting year. From groundbreaking and exciting investment to jaw-dropping job cuts and financial losses, it was a technology soap opera for the world to watch unfold.

We look at what BT has faced, both triumphantly and less successfully, where it stands now and what the future holds for this well-known business and household name.

The rise of broadband

BT has staked its claim in one of the hottest areas of the telecoms world: high speed broadband networks.

The company announced last summer that it would be investing £1.5 billion into building a national fibre-optic network with claims it could connect up to ten million homes to high speed broadband in time for the Olympic Games in 2012.

In October, it announced the first pilot sites for the speedy internet connections, one in the North London suburb of Muswell Hill and another in the Welsh town of Whitchurch. It promised initial speeds of up to 40Mbps for 30,000 people in these areas. BT claimed that it could rise to up to 60Mbps in the future.

Work behind the scenes continued as BT announced further sites in March of this year in a mixture of urban and rural locations around Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Greater Manchester.

When July hit, so did the start button on the pilots in Muswell Hill and Whitchurch. But almost as soon as they began, one had to stop. Residents in the North London pilot area complained to Haringey Council about the size of the street side cabinet boxes, suggesting BT had not applied for planning permission.

While that put a spanner into the networks, BT carried on and began their planned rollout in Glasgow to compensate for the hold up down south.

But is this area a success for BT?

Scott Morrison, research vice president of Enterprise Network Services for Gartner, believes BT’s broadband moves are not so much a success in technology as successful marketing.

“As a result, it is adept at spinning positives where it can. The level of press coverage it obtained for its plans to roll out VDSL technology – under the guise of “fibre to the cabinet” is testament to this capability,” he said.

“While the news is certainly good for UK broadband users, it merely starts to close one of the gaps which have opened up on price-performance for UK consumers versus those in other European countries, notably France, where the incumbent France Telecom and three alternative providers are vying to build fibre to the home networks nationally, or Germany, where the incumbent has been deploying VDSL technology for the past two years,” he added.

The fall of Global Services

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