Member Info for fleccy

I can see the logic of basing a ground station on the Isle of Man, since it would be able to serve the North West of the UK, and Ireland. There's probably less chance of interference from other RF sources, and the Isle of Man Government would probably welcome any new investment. The Isle of Man is served by various Submarine cables, feeding to Ireland and the UK, so they will have to rent channel capacity themselves or interconnect through Manx Telecom, I suppose it would depend on the regulatory regime on the IOM.
I'm probably wrong, but I can see loads of issues with low orbit satellite connectivity, around reliability and costs. I can see why it might be useful in Third World countries, where populations are spread out geographically, where Fibre isn't an option and even cell coverage might be difficult, but high altitude platforms could be an option there too. Some very clever people will have looked at low orbit satellite communications so my opinion is probably wrong, time will tell.

"i have a portfolio of twenty shareholdings and bt and vod are the two i have least faith in and will be sold asap."

Why do you say that, because the stock price's are low? They are both safe investments and the worst thing that could happen, from an investors point of view, is that Vodafone cut to zero, and BT's dividend suspension remains in place.
BT is most definitely undervalued on all fundamentals, even compared to other foreign Telecom stocks. Why have telecom stocks taken a beating on the back of covid? They've come through relatively unscathed, and Ryanair is beating them both on price performance, even though Ryanair is in the worst affected sector; BT has recently recovered much of its pre covid price, VOD isn't currently going anywhere, but RYA is sitting around the same price it was in December 2019, even though RYA has consistently suffered losses during the pandemic. Telecoms will come into their own, once the big players allow it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSRXB-1sxAle72GnkR-SF0E5QD6RHPSYGlVVvm1KqTmzBlulSEsSRTGIIj2DVBgZyM684m-9f7E61T1/pubchart?oid=1613401209&format=interactive

"BT are projecting 25 million premises passed by the end of 2026, and they'll reduce their Exchanges from 5,600 to 4,600 as FTTP rollout progresses. "

I should read through my posts before submitting them, what I should have typed was; BT will reduce the number of exchanges to 1000, a reduction of around 4600 exchanges from the current 5600 exchanges.

I've been looking through articles this morning and stumbled across this one, it gives a bit more detail about VM's FTTP upgrades,

https://www.telecomtv.com/content/access-evolution/virgin-media-o2-announces-2028-full-fibre-upgrade-plan-42080/

Key points:
"By utilising the company’s fully-ducted network, which are the tubes through which fibre can be laid, the upgrade will be one of the UK’s most efficient fibre rollouts, costing ~£100 per premises passed. Customer installation costs will be in addition to this, with installs operated on an on-demand basis as rollout and revenue enhancement opportunities commence.
This compares to approximately ~£60 per premises for an upgrade to a full DOCSIS 4 cable network and eliminates the need to invest in future versions of DOCSIS as the demand for faster speeds and capacity continue to rise."

It appears that VM/O2 are planning to eventually wind down DOCSIS after the 3.1 upgrade, and offer PON services instead. It makes sense to do that, since PON is far more versatile and efficient than DOCSIS.

"Total upgrade costs over the estimated seven-year life of the project will represent a modest annual increase to Virgin Media O2’s current capital expenditure budget of approximately £2 billion per year."

My Guess:
The difference between £60 and £100, is an extra £40 per premises passed; approximately £560 Million spread over the next 7 years, assuming 14 million franchise area customers. The article states that the cost relates to "one of the UK’s most efficient fibre rollouts", and "Customer installation costs will be in addition to this". I assume the extra £40 per premise passed ?doesn't relate to costs around building the new head end PON network infrastructure, and the costs of running two different networks side by side, one DOCSIS, and the other PON.
BT's upgrade costs might be expensive at around £15 Billion, but VM/O2's might be more even more expensive with mounting installation and operating costs over time.
BT are shutting down PSTN by the end of 2025, at which point any landline type telephony will be VOIP only. BT are projecting 25 million premises passed by the end of 2026, and they'll reduce their Exchanges from 5,600 to 4,600 as FTTP rollout progresses. BT are also looking to save £2 Billion annually by 2025. I know which company I prefer.

I don't disagree with anything you've stated in respect of some companies, but you need to be more specific and name individual companies? I don't see how anything you've said applies to BT. I'm not sure if your point was to suggest that long term investing is bad, and people should dive into new listings; If that was your hypothesis, then I totally disagree.
My view, for what it's worth, is that stocks and markets are heavily manipulated. The big money players can target individual stocks and sectors for years, if they so wish. Stocks heavy in retail investors are ripe for shake out, as collectively retail investors are divided, and an easy target. With dark pools, off book trades, algo's, etc, the big money can set a stocks price anywhere they want, and build their positions in the shadows; Sometimes it backfires, as demonstrated by the recent short squeeze in GameStop, which damaged some of the big hedge funds.
The press feed us a steady stream of articles, aimed at building negative sentiment toward BT, like the recent VM/O2 articles, released the same day as BT released their Q1 results. VM/O2 combined, generate just over half the revenue of BT, and will start out with around £18 Billion in long term debt, and a commitment to invest a further £10 Billion in Infrastructure, probably in 5G and FTTP, which will either suppress their bottom line for years, or add to their debt pile. Much is made of BT's debt pile, but over £6 Billion of that is lease liabilities, which will reduce significantly over the next 10 years.
As I've mentioned before, in much earlier post, all this is like Deja Vu, and reminiscent of the early days of Mercury Communications, and the hype around the CTV companies like Nynex, Vidéotron and Bell Cablemedia who ended up merging with Mercury Communications in 1996, as the CTV companies were buckling under their debt. Check out this article from 1996:
"The combined company, to be called Cable & Wireless Communications, will be by far the UK's biggest cable operator, with 1.3 million telephone and television customers concentrated in London, Manchester and Leeds, and assets of pounds 3bn.
It is likely to pose the most serious competitive threat so far to BT, which has managed to hold on to more than 90 per cent of its domestic customers, and to BSkyB, which competes with cable operators in the pay- television market."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/mercury-s-pounds-5bn-merger-with-cable-firms-heralds-huge-telecoms-indu-stry-shakeup-1359751.html

Sound familiar?

Why did Drahi buy 12.1% of BT? Probably because he can see though the foggy negative narrative, and as the fog clears BT will have a sunny outlook with a bright future.

"Think positive, or just sell up & go away is what I think! Fleccy's £2 by the end of the year, would be fantastic."

I did actually say by the end of next year, but I'd be more than happy to see £2 by the end of this year, just don't see it happening that soon unfortunately.

"watching YouTube videos or streaming doesn't use the size of data that you seem to think....as all the streaming and videos are super condensed .....they don't move an 8gb action movie from Netflix ...it is shrunk down to an incredible small packet of data that the set box then re-converts back to a watchable picture.....magic.....yes ..and no..I don't know how they do it..something about CODECS"

Compression Decompression is nothing new, it's been used in digital voice since the early days of PDH using something called A-law encoding, as well as others like ADPCM. I have no idea what techniques video codecs use, but there's a limit to the amount of compression before errors are introduced. For 4K UHD streaming they state a minimum of 25mb/s, 50mb/s recommended. I expect Satellite/Terrestrial tv will disappear in the next 20 years, with Frequencies reallocated to mobile communications; All TV will eventually stream online, along side all the other online services, including voice. We are heading to a fully converged world where everything moves to the cloud, even mobile communications, which will require massive backbone/core capacity, and I didn't even mention IOT lol.
My reasoning for investing in Telecommunication stocks, BT and Vodafone, is because I see Telecoms as a no brainer long term investment; I'll just keep reinvesting any spare cash into my Telecom investments until I see the realisation of their true value.

"Growing EBITDA: Our base case forecasts Vodafone will grow EBITDA by an average of 2%-3% p.a. over the next four years. The growth is likely to be driven by a combination of factors that include the extraction of acquisition synergies in Germany, continued cost optimisation, service-revenue growth, reduced impact from competitive pressures in Spain and Italy, and a return to normality following the impact of the pandemic. Vodafone's EBITDA growth compares favourably with that of incumbent telecom peers in Europe."

https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/fitch-upgrades-vodafone-short-term-idr-to-f2-affirms-long-term-idr-at-bbb-stable-29-07-2021

"Even so, there is still very slim chance of the SP will ever get near to that. 130's maybe, 140's will very difficult and 150's will be a miracle!"

Depends on your timescale, if you're talking about next week, or maybe even next month, you're probably correct, but there's no reason why Vodafone can't be £2+ by the end of next year. A few things seem to have knocked the share price over the last 3 years, the market seemed to take Colao's departure badly, and India may have upset sentiment too. The current low price probably suits VOD's share buyback program, although you'd think the buyback program would push the price up, but apparently not. My break even price is 153p, but I wouldn't dream of selling at that price.

"15.9m @ £27m just a tad earlier."

That was the UT Larry. The £22 Million off book trade at 18:04 went through at the closing price, so was likely executed after the Last Close price was decided.

"I dont know enough about it all...but ...isnt each Netflix user paying their ISP provider for their use of Netflix"

I think the main issues come from live streaming events, gaming updates, event days, etc, where the Network routers have to ramp up their processing to cope with the extra traffic. When the internet traffic spikes, it causes power spikes increasing the power usage for the Network providers. People can subscribe to Netflix, Disney+, etc directly, but they only pay their ISP for a connection with a defined guaranteed bandwidth on the local connection. Everyone talks about Gigabit internet connectivity, but the more bandwidth you give users, on the local connection, the more they'll download, and they'll attempt to utilise that bandwidth in full. Give everyone Gigabit connectivity, and they'll download HD, or UHD Films instead of SD and probably do it continuously, which means backbone and core network needs to be sufficient to cope with the demand. Imagine 28.1 Million UK households watching various things online, as well downloading other content at the same time, a phenomenal amount of core/backbone capacity is required to cope with that demand. If the FAANG's don't contribute more, the bill will eventually land on our doorsteps. IMO.

"Nuri123a, don't get me wrong I made a very good profits in VOD, I held them for 5 years and made a 6 figure profits."

Looks as though everyone makes money investing, apart from me lol.

"Fleccy
with respect..... you could apply that to many sectors...from whom others benefit nicely....Telecoms are far from being unique in that sense"

I agree, we need power, water, and many other things. The point I was trying to make is that Telecoms subsidise the operating models of non essential Trillion Dollar companies, who contribute little.
Google is a search engine, there are others if Google disappeared; Facebook is just a total waste of space in my opinion; Media streaming companies like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, etc just suck bandwidth out of the network; Amazon whole delivery business model is dependent on the internet; Apple is another utilising lots of bandwidth with various content and cloud streaming services.
My point is, all these companies are effectively subsidised under Net Neutrality rules, all it would take is a slight change in the rules and more profit would be redistributed to the Telecom providers, whether Governments would do that remains to be seen.
BT has been making noise about the FAANGs carbon footprint, and the subsidy provided to them by the Telecom providers. I read somewhere that OFCOM is looking into this, wouldn't it be wonderful if some of the FAANG profits were redistributed to the ISP's/providers?

"The downside is he will want to do it at these suppressed prices. Buy and hold imo on any further weakness."

Going off past history, we wont get to hear about it until the announcement comes out. If an RNS came out showing Altice were growing their position, then expect big jumps in the price. I have a gut feeling things are happening under the surface, encouraged by things like the RNS's from Morgan Stanley over the last couple of days.
The market has decided to give Telecoms a kicking at the slightest excuse, yet Telecom providers make companies like Goggle, Facebook, Netflix, etc, etc possible. You'd think that Telecoms is a take it or leave it sector, but it provides essential services that makes the modern world functional. Imagine if the internet just disappeared, the world would fall apart.

Kitchen sinking springs to mind, it's like they wanted to knock the price. I was looking at topping up an ISA next month, and was looking at VOD, but I might just add more BT instead now. I'll see where the prices are next month and decide then. Of course I could just split the difference and buy both lol.

I'm unsure of VM's long term costs around their network upgrades. From what I've read, all their current upgrades are aimed at keeping the head end infrastructure, and squeezing as much as they can out of DOCSYS. There are arguments that VM should completely scrap their current network infrastructure, and go for a full PON operating model like BT are.
BT are scrapping PSTN, and going for a majority passive access network with around 4 main components, OLT's, ONT's, Splitters, and the Fibre. The Fibre and the splitters don't require power, the ONT's will be powered by the customer, and the OLT's will be powered at the head end. BT will only need on street power for bespoke type solutions, and will therefore have a very low carbon footprint.
VM's Fibre solution uses "RF over Glass", which means a box on the outside of the house, terminating the Fibres, with the coaxial connection feeding into the property, similar to the current set up. VM will still require powered street cabinets, to support the DOCSIS operating model, so not as upgradeable as Openreach's network, and more power intensive.

https://richardglover.co.uk/2017/07/virgin-media-fttp-install/

At some point in the future VM will have to do a BT, scrap their old network, and move to an xPON type infrastructure. It might be a decades away, or sooner, but they'll have to move to xPON at some point.

Lloyds released a fantastic set of figures today, and is currently down over 2%. I would have assumed it was my fault, if it hadn't been for the fact that VOD is up today lol. Not too worry, it's only an issue for the short termers.

"Most of the debt is on pension provision so if interest rates go up the cost will go down."

I don't see the pension as a big problem, I suspect it will become insignificant in the next 5 years.

"Some good points but just look at the debt it keeps going up to now £18bn + "

Actually a big chunk of BT's debt is lease liabilities, but these will reduce as BT close buildings, over time, and hand them back to Telereal. Net financial debt is actually £12.5bn with lease liabilities over £6 Billion, reducing going up to 2030 and beyond, if I'm reading things correctly.

Even though this Quarter's results are rubbish, it doesn't change my long term view of BT. Long term holders should look at the large projected future cost savings, which will significantly increase the bottom line once the FTTP/5G upgrades are completed.