Member Info for fleccy

"As Ofcom deliberates the next five years of telecoms regulation, Openreach has quietly slipped out hefty discounts that seek to encourage communication providers using its network to migrate customers from copper to fibre. The limited-time deal has attracted criticism from Openreach rivals and provoked a strongly-worded response from one challenger in particular.

Giles Rowbotham

Giles Rowbotham

Source: nexfibre

Leaders at nexfibre, the Virgin Media O2-affiliated fibreco, led a chorus of complaints at Connected Britain 2025. Both Rajiv Datta, Chief Executive, and Giles Rowbotham, General Counsel and Chief Development Officer, offered what they called “free promotion” of Openreach’s discounting practice in order to question its fairness.

Rowbotham described the deal as a 25% discount on Equinox 2 terms and a 45% discount to full list price for ISPs that migrate customers on copper networks to full-fibre alternatives.

“ It’s an enormously aggressive offer, and it’s basically saying to ISPs ‘we’re giving you a window where you can make a huge saving if you drive your copper base onto fibre’. ”

Rowbotham.

Rajiv Datta

Rajiv Datta

Source: nexfibre

Datta warned that deals like this, offered by an incumbent that regulator Ofcom considers has ‘significant market power’ (SMP), risks “going back to the same position that we started off” — or, as Rowbotham put it, enabling Openreach to “shut down its copper and move that dominant position into fibre”"

https://www.telcotitans.com/btwatch/enormously-aggressive-nexfibre-leads-altnet-complaints-against-openreach-copper-to-fibre-discounting/9748.article

Don't you get bored with leaving and coming back, playing the same tune with a different moniker?

I picked up on this comment in the Telegraph article:

"New Street Research analysts said they expected VodafoneThree to push harder on FWA, given high levels of spectrum capacity and the ability to challenge existing players such as BT and Virgin Media O2 without high infrastructure costs"

Yet an article in LightReading trashes New Street Research's opinion. In the the LightReading article it says:

"VodafoneThree has worse spectrum than BT, faces vendor swap-out costs and is reliant on VMO2 in parts of the UK"

"VodafoneThree's heavier reliance on 3.5GHz TDD spectrum will make covering the whole country with a 5G service much harder, simply because of inconvenient scientific laws. In lower frequencies, signals travel further and are less impeded by walls and other obstacles. Higher bands often deliver the speediest connections, but those aren't much use to someone who doesn't even have a signal.

To compensate, VodafoneThree plans to operate a bigger network than EE in terms of site numbers. After its merger and some initial decommissioning, it currently maintains about 33,000, according to a knowledgeable source. But it aims to reduce this to about 26,000 by taking others out of service. That will leave it with around 7,000 more than BT. It will also leave it with a bigger bill for equipment maintenance and energy costs.

Unlike VodafoneThree, moreover, BT isn't in the position of having to replace any vendors apart from China's Huawei, which the government has ordered out of the UK by the end of 2027. BT has used Nokia since before the 5G era, introducing Ericsson back in 2020, after authorities put restrictions on Chinese suppliers. How much Huawei equipment is left in the BT network is currently unclear, but today's vendor strategy was defined years ago.

The VodafoneThree network, by contrast, is currently a United Nations of suppliers that includes Ericsson, Huawei, Samsung and possibly a sprinkling of Nokia. But only Ericsson and Nokia are to remain. Having barely had any recent presence in the Vodafone and Three networks, Nokia will replace Huawei at 3,700 sites, Ericsson at 2,400 and Samsung at roughly 900 sites. All (or nearly all) of those Samsung sites were old 4G ones maintained by Three"

https://www.lightreading.com/5g/bt-thinks-it-can-beat-vodafonethree-in-5g-by-four-years-no-wonder

I'm invested in both BT and Vodafone and I think they'll both do well, but it appears that the Telegraph article is more spin than substance.

I read the article and in my opinion it's just part of the recent moves to spin negative sentiment around BT. There's been broker downgrades, added short position's totaling over 1% and some highly negative press pointed in BT's direction recently, we've seen this playbook before.

There's so much wrong with the article in the Telegraph; It mentions FWA, but only associates it with Vodafone/Three and no mention of EE. Good luck to anyone trying to stream 4K films in a contended mobile network, or do online gaming, or any other streaming involving low latency or fast download speeds if, as the article implies, everyone ditches Fibre and uses their mobiles instead. Why would anyone use Starlink once Fibre is available in their location, don't get me wrong if I lived half way up a mountain in rural Scotland I'd pay for Starlink, but once the majority of villages are covered by Fibre why would anyone their pay extra for an inferior service? They wouldn't.

"And there is no guarantee that the fund will in the blue by 2030"

Actually there's a very good chance the pension scheme will be fully funded by then, but it'll largely depend on the performances of the bond/equity markets.

Ha, nice to see Ben at Bude featured heavily in the YouTube submarine cable Video. I like his matchbox metaphor, fame at last 😜

"There are some interesting titbits in Watson's update. EE, as the mobile arm of BT is called, will be the first European telco to invest in a new generation of massive MIMO radios from Ericsson, he claims. Massive MIMO, an advanced antenna technology, is usually associated with the 3.5GHz spectrum band and time division duplex (TDD), the use of the same frequency block for uplink and downlink communications. The Ericsson AIR 3284 is triple-band and designed for the alternative frequency division duplex (FDD) system, which runs the uplink in a separate frequency block from the downlink. The new radios can deliver up to four times the uplink capacity of their predecessors, says Watson"

https://www.lightreading.com/5g/bt-thinks-it-can-beat-vodafonethree-in-5g-by-four-years-no-wonder

"Hello Fleccy. I am amazed that you only have 126 grand in vod, You gave the impression you had far more than that"

We did have more invested in Vodafone, but sold just under 36,000 Vodafone shares back in March. The Vodafone sale was at a loss, but the loss was used to offset a significant gain on a batch of Lloyds shares we sold on the same day. The proceeds from those sales was used to top up our ISA's with the rest invested in BT shares. The ISA money was used to buy back some Vodafone stock, at a lower book price in one of the ISA's, with the rest invested in BP in another ISA.

I'm also not invested in any miners.

I do see the usefulness of Gold as a hedge against inflation, but I don't invest in it as it doesn't generate dividend income. I am invested in BP (Oil) at an average book price of around £3.90, due to the dividend yield and my opinion that the stock is cheap. In summary I'm not invested in Yellow Gold, only in Black Gold.

Mole_man99 posts on here more often than I do, which is strange bearing in mind that me and my wife have over £126 Grand invested in Vodafone. I'm at a loss as to his motivation for posting here, when going off his previous posts he is only interested in US "Growth" stocks. mole implies that people should sell their undervalued UK stocks and pile into overvalued US stocks, incidentally the US Government is currently shutdown with no sign of the US Senate coming to agreement. Personally I wouldn't go near many US stocks at their current bubble valuations.

In my opinion this is the market gaming the stock, shorts added, a couple of downgrades and possible algo driven trading aimed at dropping BT's price and you have all the ingredients for a shake out; Add the ingredients into a mixing bowl, give things a good stir and leave to bake for a period of time then Bon Appetit they'll feast on the sellers.

We're currently sitting on around £7,000, from dividends in our ISA's, and pondering where to invest the cash, if BT drops low enough it'll be going there.

"but also there are competitive threats from alternative technologies"

Really, what new technologies are you referring to?

"If technology moves in some of the several possible directions that the future might hold, then BT could end up as kings of betamax"

Be more specific?

Low Earth Orbit satellites are no threat to terrestrial communication providers, any media suggesting that is pumping a fake narrative. As far as FTTP technologies, most residential customers wouldn't notice the difference between a GPON 500Kb/s and an XGS-PON 2Gb/s service, apart from the fanboys; Also BT could rapidly add XGS-PON, or higher, in parallel with existing GPON without interfering with current GPON customers, so the argument about ALTNETS rolling out XGS-PON and BT only supplying GPON giving ALTNETS an advantage is more of a marketing narrative than a service advantage.

"Does that not seem like maybe it's just a little overcooked???"

No, if you look back through my posting history you'll see that I've said BT is a cost cutting play rather than a growth play; I've also pointed out on man occasions that growth didn't factor into my reasoning for investing in BT and that BT was certain to lose a percentage of their market share to competition. OFCOM has shackled BT to allow competition to get a foot in the door, without OFCOM BT would wipe out the competition with a swish of its tail. BT might come out of this smaller, but it'll be a lot leaner and any growth will show in the bottom line Net Profit. Once the transformation's complete BT will likely look for other revenue growth streams, but they're currently pumping any spare cash into the FTTP and 5G rollouts.

"As an indication of the progress of the build-out, on 1 July 2025, Openreach reported that 19 million premises across the UK could then order its gigabit broadband technology and that it was on track to reach five million more homes and businesses with its broadband network during the year to March 2026.

It added that seven million UK premises were already taking services based on its network via a host of popular providers – 37% of the full footprint. Yet Openreach noted that, at present, only around 38% of households that could order full-fibre from Openreach have made the switch"

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366632072/Openreach-UK-broadband-upgrade-reaches-20-million-homes

"but warned that BT’s advantages in scale, brand and existing relationships “cast a long shadow”. Without intervention, he said, “BT will reassert the dominance it had in the copper market – over our full fibre future. This cannot be allowed to happen”"

https://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/cityfibre-ceo-calls-for-urgent-consolidation-to-challenge-bt/

"Meanwhile they lose market share and lean ever heavier on cost cutting"

No meanwhile about it, BT have been clear about their plans since as far back 2018. BT was always going to lose a percentage of their market share due to being heavily regulated to allow competition to grow. You seem caught up in the narrative that growth is the be all and end all, but there's also value investing in companies paying good dividends that are undervalued, I would put BT into that basket.

As someone pointed out earlier in the thread, you missed out on the recent rises in BT's share price due to bailing out too soon, sour grapes isn't an investment strategy it just leads to resentment. I'd put you in the same category as Savage in the Vodafone share chat, maybe you should both start your own sour grapes club 😜

" I'd buy at £1.55 now"

Good luck with that, although it's possible BT may drop back to that sort of price level the odds are against it.

"Taking BT Group

BT.A

0.51%

as a quick example, it had a pension deficit of £4.1 billion in the year ended March 2025, down from £4.8 billion a year earlier. To solve the deficit, it made cash payments into the pension fund of £803 million and is forecast to make similar payments for the next five years. Putting that in perspective, BT paid out dividends of £788 million last year, or around 8.1p per share, so solving the pension problem could release a huge amount of cash to return to shareholders, and would also add around 8p to earnings as the deficit payments are an expense and reduce profits.

There is the potential for some good news on the horizon as well because corporate pensions are subject to valuations every three years, and BT in particular is due to complete their next one by June 2026. The current revaluation of the pension fund would reflect the drastic moves in gilt markets.

While I wouldn’t invest purely on this basis, as pensions actuaries are want to be conservative and are unlikely to rubber stamp a large cut in deficit funding, with a company like BT and the wider UK market in general, it’s something that could provide support to valuations and a re-rating going into next year. So, I’d be happy to look at some of the unloved UK equities now this pension headache is clearing"

https://www.ii.co.uk/analysis-commentary/how-pensions-windfall-could-turbocharge-uk-stock-market-ii536598