Member Info for fleccy

The drop today may be due to the announcement of the EU/US trade deal. Telecoms are viewed as a defensive sector and BT has risen a lot recently, it's possible some profit taking is happening to move cash into risk stocks.

"What do you think about the case of the latest Proactive Investor interview, where Gardin said that Method B's performance was reduced to "north of 10%"?

Should this piece of information have been released in an RNS?"

Probably not Steve. I don't think there's ever been a commercial release of Method B and they didn't definitively commit to the 260% improvement in their previous PRN's, they used phrases like theoretical and anticipated.

"Open reach still has the network others just lease from them other wise every street box would have to be replaced and open reach would just laugh they have and will always have the keys"

With FTTP there's no need for street cabinets, because there are no powered equipment's between the customer premises and the exchange. I assume the various individual ISP customer's are put into VLAN's and directed to the correct ISP at the exchange. Any PIA is probably audited and authorised by Openreach.

"Market Abuse Regulation – what it means for you

Your organisation and its employees, like any other body or person, are subject to the prohibitions on insider dealing, market manipulation and the unlawful disclosure of inside information under MAR. But some of MAR’s provisions are only legally binding on issuers of financial instruments, market participants and trading venues, not on organisations like yours. The area of MAR which is most relevant to you is Article 10, which sets out what amounts to unlawful disclosure of inside information. Article 14 of MAR prohibits the unlawful disclosure of inside information and makes it illegal"

https://www.fca.org.uk/markets/best-practice-note-identifying-controlling-and-disclosing-inside-information

"Descriptions of behaviour that indicate unlawful disclosure

MAR 1.4.2G03/07/2016

RP

The following behavioursare indications of unlawful disclosure:

(1) disclosure of inside information by the director of an issuer to another in a social context; and

(2) selective briefing of analysts by directors of issuers or others who are persons discharging managerial responsibilities"

https://www.handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/MAR/1/4.html

"The bottoms line is, no minutes were taken after the voting ended and the meeting was “closed” (as there is no legal requirement to do so)"

It's irrelevant as long as no market moving information was shared that isn't publicised to the market and made available to shareholders who didn't attend. If critical information was shared informally at the end of the meeting, the company would have a duty to issue an RNS to inform the market; It's a crime to share insider information that isn't available to the general market. I'd suggest nothing would have been shared at the AGM that may be market moving, or they'd be legally bound to publish such information.

"The long-term problem for BT, how long I don't know, is the move away from FTTP to something akin to Starlink"

LEO satellites have been suggested as a possible replacement for FTTP by many posters, you couldn't put enough satellites in orbit, or High Altitude Platforms in the sky to come fractionally close to FTTP's bandwidth capability. Satellites are fine for servicing a low number of customers, but wouldn't come close to offering service to millions of customers in urban environment's. People should read up on the limitation's of offering high capacity service's over Radio Frequencies, with the higher bandwidth radio frequencies severely affected by atmospherics and other issues.

"Every other Telco can make the same cost savings. That gives them scope to cut prices and devalue further BTs revenue streams"

That's clearly incorrect, Altnets, Cable companies and Vodafone don't have thousands of Exchanges all over the country to close. The Altnets never had a PSTN/Legacy network to shut down, but they have had to finance their rollout's purely from debt and equity, since they never had earnings from the outset to finance their rollouts; Vodafone does have legacy network to close, due to their 5G upgrade and any old legacy on the post Cable & Wireless Worldwide Network; VMO2 have a lot of legacy network to upgrade, due to their reliance on DOCSIS/HFC network which they're racing to upgrade to FTTP and that isn't cheap either. All the Telco's have issues to deal with, BT's isn't as dramatic as many others. No other company can cut costs to the extent BT can.

"it is on the mobile operator to come up with new propositions (satellite to smartphone, for example)"

Satellite to smartphone is a niche product for remote areas, it's no threat to mainstream communications. Telco's, including BT, are already using LEO satellites for backhauling Cell sites and some remote areas, a good example is BT's trial on Lundy.

https://newsroom.bt.com/bt-and-oneweb-deliver-high-speed-satellite-connectivity-to-lundy-island/#

Satellites lend themselves to backhaul far more than direct to mobile, in my opinion direct to mobile might be useful in the arctic, or on a small boat out at sea, or deep in a jungle somewhere, 🤔 as I say niche.

🥱😴

"Looking at today's BT results I think it's become over speculated upon, it booked shrinking revenues yet the SP has surged today - Looks prime for going large on shorting it IMO!"

Savage I've explained the investment case for BT many times over, do you remember?

"Fleecy - the first rule of telecom security is to use the correct encryption & the second is to assume over time it will be broken"

Encryption is just one layer of security, and as your post intimates Harvest now Decrypt later is also a threat. The only sure way to protect data is to make it as hard as possible to access the data. In my opinion, the UK Government wont allow a foreign entity to take over BT, you only need to look at the rhetoric around the Vodafone/Three merger and the security measures mentioned to facilitate the merger; BT has far wider security implications than the VOD/Three merger.

"Fleccy, I think you are wrong about the government not allowing a foreign entity to take over BT. Look what happened to the Post Office/Royal Mail"

BT isn't Royal Mail, BT carries the communications for various Government entities like GCHQ as an example. To service highly secure communications, companies like BT have dedicated positively vetted Engineers and maybe one or two positively vetted Board member who oversee that part of the business. Equipment's carrying secretive communications will be in locked cabinets and sometimes in caged off areas to prevent access by unauthorised staff. Caging off and securing the equipment's in locked cabinets might prevent access to the main equipment, but once the data leaves the secure area it can be sniffed off optically, or further into the IP Network. I just don't see the UK Government allowing a foreign entity unfettered access to the UK's main telecommunication infrastructure provider.

This thread caught my interest, so I thought I'd take a look and think about some of the issues. Although high powered lasers can penetrate clouds, low power lasers can't. From an article I read, I think they're using an array of mirrors on the satellite to take care of directional gain and compensate for atmospherics and free space path loss; This may be similar in concept to phased array elements used in Microwave transmission at much lower frequencies, so there'll likely be a lower limit to the number of users a satellite can handle within a specific area, and weather conditions would matter too.

Although it's an amazing achievement it's unlikely it'll go beyond the concept phase, into full commercialisation, except possibly in a few niche applications.

Hello CandidArma, tell us how you think a bid will materialise? Who'll bid and explain how they'll get it past the Government?

Do you remember Cable & Wireless Worldwide, ever wonder why Tata suddenly pulled out of the bidding leaving only Vodafone? At the time it was reported that Tata pulled out because they couldn't agree a price with the CWW board, leaving only Vodafone who subsequently took over the business for a measly £1 Billion. In my opinion CWW was worth far more than Vodafone purchased it for, Tata would also have known the true value of CWW so why did they really pull out? I suspect the UK Government quietly told them too and Vodafone had already been lined up for the takeover.

If the UK Government were ever going to approve a bid for BT, they wouldn't allow a foreign company to do it, so that'd be Deutsch Telekom and Bharti out of the picture; It's likely it would have to be a British based entity and I'm not sure who that'd be, since Vodafone would be out of picture for competition reasons and their market cap is also low so they'd struggle to finance a takeover anyway.

"I don’t want to see this which is why I want to see radical action and a concentration on revenue growth & cost cutting, or a stronger defensive strategy & cost cutting"

Revenue growth through diversification is super difficult for Telecom companies. TV streaming is already a highly competitive sector with the various entities spending Billions on producing content, BT have done the right thing by proceeding to get out of that. The Altnets aren't making enough margin to maintain the current low prices we're currently seeing, so I expect at some point Telecom services will become more expensive.

Net Neutrality has helped the various Tech Giants to keep costs down, so to a certain extent they've had a free lunch. There'd be nothing stopping Governments allowing Telecom companies to charge high bandwidth providers, over a pre-determined level, for excessive usage; I could only see that happening if the end customer prices climb excessively due to tight margins suffered by the Telecom providers.

BT are a Telecom company and it'd be awesome if they could diversify into other things, but I couldn't guess what that'd be other than different offerings within the Telecom space.

PRK there's a risk with any investment, I think you'll find that the PSTN business has been on the decline for years. The PSTN legacy network requires a lot of electricity, not just with powering the switches, but also running air conditioning and general building facilities including maintaining generators and battery backup's. With thousands of Exchange buildings closing it's easy to see how much it will hugely reduce BT's cost of operations.

The newer network is fully optical and uses the same core network to carry Video, Voice and Mobile and although core network Router/Switches are power hungry, there'll be far less of them, with the Edge Routers also more efficient than the equipment they're replacing. FTTP doesn't require powered street cabinets, unlike FTTC, so the majority of the street cabinets will go along with any maintenance and power requirements.

Because this has been telegraphed for a long time, Enterprise businesses have already been moving their voice to VOIP and VPN, via IP connectivity, so there's still a lot of Enterprise business that BT are in a good position to offer services to. In our house, we all have mobiles and got rid of our land line years ago, as have many retail households, so I suspect the PSTN switch off wont take much from BT's revenue since BT already own a mobile business.

BT don't just sell one product, they're shaping their business to take advantage of the latest evolutions in telecommunications. Because of BT's ownership of national infrastructure and extensive Network services portfolio, in my opinion BT is in a better position than most to take advantage of the latest changes in telecom architecture.

It's one of my wife's fav's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gioo3IAkwp4&t=1s

Well the market works because investors have different points of view, personally I'm very optimistic about BT's prospects. BT has remained the incumbent in spite of people saying the Cable companies would change that, I doubt BT will sit on their hands as competition hots up. Telecoms are all about scale and I don't currently see anything that'll threaten BT's dominance. This has a pre 2000 Deja Vu feel to it, similar to the early history of the cable companies.

The market appears to take a different view to yours PRK, going off the direction of the share price.

"Phimx, can you show me exactly where it says that QBT products were ready for SALE?"

"The Company refers to a message it posted yesterday on its X (formerly known as Twitter) account which states that its proprietary Method A and Method B software are “available as a SaaS client-server cloud application by uploading an upgrade to the mining rigs' firmware.”

In addition, QBT has revised the Method A and Method B product descriptions on its website, by stating that they are now available as a SaaS platform (Software as a Service) and have added two animations visualising the data obtained by running Method A and Method B on its GPU testing platforms in time lapse.

The need to adapt both Methods to a client-server architecture emerged from discussions with potential BTC mining clients/partners and their request for QBT source code to be installed on their mining rigs to be inspected for security and other technical reasons. QBT, however, is not prepared to share the source code of its Methods with any third party. The Company has therefore made its Methods available in the form of a SaaS platform to enable the core of the Methods to be installed on a QBT protected server and accessed by potential BTC mining clients and partners to allow them to undertake evaluation of the Methods and this was the substance of yesterday’s X announcement"

https://www.londonstockexchange.com/news-article/QBT/market-update/16176350

Oct 2023

"Quantum Blockchain Technologies says its bitcoin mining algorithm’s Method A and Method B software are “available as a SaaS client-server cloud application by uploading an upgrade to the mining rigs' firmware.”"

https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1030485/quantum-blockchain-keeps-mining-source-code-in-house-1030485.html