Charles Jillings, CEO of Utilico, energized by strong economic momentum across Latin America. Watch the video here.
Pemptiphobia, fear of Thursdays. Haha.
BT Misery, noun, a heightened state or feeling of great physical or mental distress or discomfort.
Collins Dictionary are in the process of adding new words/phrases for 2022 as they do every year, such as selfies etc. I think they need to add BT Misery next year.
7p down on opening, 4p down at close. I don’t hold much faith in Global and Enterprise, but hey ho. I’ll do cartwheels outside the house if Market is positive to BT.
Fax machines to finally disappear under proposed Ofcom rule changes.
BT will no longer be legally required to provide connections.
“TalkTalk broadband takeover hopes dashed as cost-of-living pressure mounts
Market turmoil scuppers Sir Charles Dunstone's plans to sell to Virgin Media O2”.
Rodney I’ll keep it short, I know how pasting articles with lots of words vexes you.
Good shout Erik, this is what I found. But it looks like BTPS sold any of their stake.
Argent King’s Cross Limited Partnership
Backed by Argent, one of the UK’s best respected property developers, and Hermes Investment Management on behalf of the BT Pension Scheme. Argent is the asset manager for King’s Cross. Argent has developed Brindleyplace in Birmingham and Manchester’s Piccadilly.
https://www.kingscross.co.uk/whos-developing-kings-cross
Intention of this report
For over five years, Federated Hermes Limited (FHL), formerly Hermes Fund Managers Limited (HFML), has produced a comprehensive annual report going far beyond the disclosure requirements for a privately held UK incorporated company. In doing so, we sought to emulate best practice of publicly listed companies both in the level of disclosure and in particular in the integrated nature of the report by discussing at length FHL’s performance relative to all its key stakeholders. This is in line with what we encourage our investee companies to produce through our investor stewardship activities.
In 2021 and Q1 2022, Federated Hermes, Inc. purchased the remaining stake in FHL held by the BT Pension Scheme and the Employee Benefit Trust/employees, respectively. As such, we decided that the accounts of the wholly owned subsidiary which FHL now is, should be limited to the statutory requirement.
Nevertheless, we wanted to continue to deliver a report which our stakeholders could hold us to account on. This ‘front end’ of an ‘integrated’ annual report has been produced to do that and describes in detail FHL’s performance in 2021 for each of
its stakeholders and furnishes board committee reports which describe FHL’s governance and the rationale for its activities and decisions.
https://www.hermes-investment.com/uploads/2022/08/436a1b5a565c16ac02dd5e63c7dc4170/fhl-corporate-annual-report-2021.pdf
ND, didn’t Dr Who have 2 hearts, can’t be Rodders then.
Community Fibre is planning to expand its network to 2.2 million homes by 2024.
A private equity backed-challenger to BT has secured nearly £1bn in funding to expand its full-fibre network across London, the latest injection of capital into the so-called “alt nets” taking on the former state monopoly.
Community Fibre, which is backed by US fund Warburg Pincus, Deutsche Telekom, infrastructure fund Amber and the railways pensions scheme, is planning to wire up 2.2 million London homes to full fibre broadband by 2024.
The fibre roll out will focus on London and the South East, where it has so far connected 675,000 homes, building and operating its own broadband network. The £985m in funding adds to £400m raised by Community Fibre in 2020.
Olaf Swantee, the former chief executive of EE and chairman of Community Fibre, said: “The lenders and our shareholders share the view that Community Fibre’s momentum will further strengthen its position as the best and largest fibre-to-the-home provider in London.” Investment bankers Rothschild advised on the funding.
Community Fibre, which has focused on social and council housing, secured investment from the state-backed National Digital Infrastructure Fund, which is managed by Amber, in 2018.
Debt financing has poured into new rivals to BT that have taken on its Openreach network, laying fibre optic cables that provide faster network connections than Britain’s ageing copper wire network.
Cityfibre, which is building a rival to BT’s Openreach network, has raised £4.9bn in debt. The Telegraph reported in August that Hyperoptic, which has already raised hundreds of millions of pounds for its fibre network, was planning to return to debt markets to fund further expansion.
Close to 100 alt nets have been wiring up homes across the UK, fuelled by infrastructure investors. Increasingly, these broadband challengers to BT have been eyeing mergers and consolidation.
A study by INCA, which represents independent networks, found that investors had earmarked £12bn to plough into Britain’s broadband infrastructure.
BT meanwhile is spending £12bn with the aim of connecting 25 million homes to full fibre broadband by the late 2020s.
Increasingly, investors are warning the vast amounts of funding going into Britain’s broadband could lead to “overbuild”, where multiple networks compete for the same areas, making it more difficult for smaller challengers to survive.
A report by the Internet Service Providers Association, which includes BT, claimed the “sheer number of companies building networks is unsustainable”, adding the market had reached “saturation”.
Fleccy has been adding lots of meat to the bones of this story for months.
If it weren’t for the big streaming companies (55% of data traffic/volume) then 10-30meg that’s available to most of the UK is sufficient to carry out practically all other internet tasks, including WHF for most. I have 50-60 meg which is more than I need, even with computer playing kids at home. The primary reason full fibre upgrades are needed is because of the streaming companies March on trying to dominate the world of entertainment.
Cont.
“Introducing a 'sender pays' principle is not a new idea,” continues Brittin, “and would upend many of the principles of the open internet.”
One of Big Tech’s Brussels lobby groups, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, is leading the charge against the plans on this side of the Atlantic on behalf of Big Tech. Amazon is one of its members, together with Apple, Facebook, Google and others.
Vice president Christian Borggreen says: “Operators are already being paid by their customers. It now seems like telcos want to double-dip in an attempt to make online content and service providers pay for internet traffic in spite of Europe’s long standing commitment to net neutrality.”
Those concerns were echoed by Adrian Kennard, director of small British internet service provider Andrews & Arnold. Far from seeing a windfall from the big operators’ plans if they become reality, Kennard worries that altnets – small and micro-scale operators – such as his will find themselves tied up in bureaucracy and at the mercy of middlemen.
“People are watching streaming TV all the time anyway,” he shrugs. “If they happen to be watching some streaming sports event instead of watching some rerun of the X Files, it really doesn't make a huge difference to us in terms of bandwidth anymore.”
For now Ofcom is resting on its laurels, perhaps preoccupied as it prepares to assume its upcoming Online Safety Bill powers. So far in the UK, there are no firm plans to pass new laws forcing streaming providers to pay telecoms companies for the privilege of sending their traffic to consumers.
But if the telcos get their way, you might see a few more pounds added to your favourite streaming site’s subscriptions.
From Today’s Telegraph.
“If you struggle to watch the US Open on your mobile phone, you wouldn't contact Amazon,” growls one fed-up boss. “You would contact your phone provider and say ‘why is my network s---?’”
Another senior source chips in: “Listen, that idea that we will be just continuing to invest for the last mile when the European telco industry doesn't even have returns above the cost of capital is simply unsustainable”.
Cost of capital, or ensuring a meaningful return on investment, is a critical factor for telco bosses wanting to keep pace with network technology advances.
Rising capital expenditures are a fact of life for Britain’s mobile network operators. Vodafone Group has spent €23.6bn on network improvements over the past three years, with BT spending topping £12bn over the same period and mobile operator Three splashing out £784m last year alone.
Telco bosses suggest sustaining this level of spending is only possible with new laws to force telcos and tech companies to negotiate over prices for transmitting and carrying web traffic, one suggests.
One figure bandied around is 50 million: the threshold for the number of users of an internet service that ought to trigger its inclusion in the new market plans. Whether that includes the likes of Wordpress (455m users), TikTok (around 1.5 billion) or even arts and crafts photo website Pinterest (432m users) isn’t yet clear. It isn’t just these household names either.
Other companies with a dog in this fight are content delivery networks (CDNs), internet businesses whose networks are pivotal in streaming shows such as Game of Thrones or even the Six Nations to consumers’ devices. When asked if CDNs such as Akamai, Cloudflare or Lumen Technologies could be caught in his industry’s plans, one mobile network engineering executive pauses.
“That’s a tricky question,” he eventually says. “But if you think about their business model, they are about taking the pain away for large content providers to distribute the content globally, right? And often they charge based on volume.” In his off-the-cuff answer, one of the CDNs’ business models is a potential solution for cash-hungry telcos.
Tempers have frayed in Britain over these plans. Last winter’s Ofcom consultation saw ITV branding telcos’ proposals as “akin to gas companies seeking to charge hob manufacturers for the increased demand for gas that they create”.
This colourful description chimes with the tech companies. Google’s top European executive Matt Brittin said: “All this [streaming and web traffic] amounts to an economic surplus which is distributed to all the internet users and businesses across Europe,” asserting that Google activity generates “€420bn a year in value” for Britons and EU citizens alike.
“Google traffic” includes small and medium businesses, he points out: many Android app developers distribute their programmes through Google’s Play Store. The same holds true for Apple’s App Store.
Telcos demand streaming services dig deep as Britain's networks creak.
Britain is set to become a key battleground over net neutrality as telecoms companies square up for a fight with Big Tech over who should pay to upgrade the nation’s phone infrastructure.
Following an Ofcom consultation last year which hinted at an “overhaul” of the UK’s net neutrality rules, telecoms companies have been on manoeuvres to convince legislators here and in Brussels that new laws are needed to force tech companies to fund their network upgrades.
Whether it’s the latest episode of House of the Dragon or the Rings of Power, behind the crystal-clear picture on your phone or tablet is an increasingly advanced and expensive series of computer networks.
Telcos, led on this side of the Atlantic by lobby group the European Telecoms Network Operators’ Association (ETNO), say they cannot afford to keep investing in network infrastructure to deliver hi-resolution streaming video to tens of millions of people at once. But with the likes of Netflix booking profits of $5.1bn (£4.55bn) for 2021, it’s clear to some where the money for future 5G rollouts could come from.
Joakim Reiter, Vodafone’s chief external and corporate affairs officer, is blunt about who could solve the funding problem: over-the-top players (OTTs), the industry name for streaming services.
“A small number of leading OTTs now account for over 55pc of all network traffic,” says Reiter. “Just looking at the picture today, traffic driven by OTTs generates costs of up to €40bn per year for EU telcos.”
He adds: “This drives an enormous amount of investments in pure capacity expansion, scarce capital that could have, for example, been used for rural coverage.”
Joining Vodafone in its demands for Big Tech to pay for content delivery is BT, whose chief executive Philip Jansen signed an open letter in September with other ETNO members’ bosses calling on Brussels to legislate and force Big Tech to pay telcos for streaming their content to end customers.
“For this to happen, and to be sustainable over time, we believe that the largest traffic generators should make a fair contribution to the sizeable costs they currently impose on European networks,” said the letter.
Vodafone’s Reiter cites figures from consultants at Frontier Economics to estimate how much a typical subscriber’s data usage costs telcos to provide. Analysts came up with an average figure of between €40 and €47 (£41) per customer over the course of a year.
For a mobile phone subscriber on a two year iPhone 14 contract, OTT data costs might make up 10pc of the total bill. For consumers on a budget smartphone deal, that data cost might make up a third of their monthly bills.
Getting Big Tech explicitly involved in funding content delivery could solve customer service challenges, too.
Cont…..
Just to add, if there was a bid, I’d favour DT over Drahi.
1. It would be more palatable to the gov, and
2. Would generate a higher initial bid than Mr Drahi.
Also Tim H talked about being King Maker, I read this as DT being a facilitator in the conquest and not the recipient of receiving the crown.
Ally, DT have been in the driving seat years b4 Drahi came on the scene, if they wanted to make a move they will have done it, so big question, how low does the share price have to go to tempt a major player.
Then the key question is, how much would DT sell their shares for?? That is if Drahi were to get himself into the bidding seat, the best route to achieve this is to acquire DT’s shares. If this happens and Drahi achieved 30%+. Then Drahi cannot bid less than the highest price he paid for any BT share in his portfolio. So are DT king makers?? So how much do DT want for their shares??
6.5p/5% drop today is a kicking in my view. Given the already depressed price already.
Nearly a third of Britain's telecoms customers – some eight million households – are finding it difficult to pay for their phone, broadband, pay-TV and streaming, according to telecoms regulator Ofcom.
The number of struggling families has doubled since last year and is at the highest level since its records began, the regulator’s annual affordability survey found.
Ofcom urged telecoms companies to provide more support for customers during the cost-of-living crisis and said the big operators should abandon the formula that sets prices at inflation plus 3.9%.
According to the survey, one in seven families has cut back spending on items such as food and clothing to be able to afford their communication services, while 9% have cancelled a service.
The regulator called on EE, Vodafone (LON:VOD), TalkTalk, Shell (LON:RDSa) Energy and Plusnet to launch social tariffs across the broadband packages they offer.
Although take-up of broadband social tariffs has more than doubled in the past six months, from 55,000 to 136,000 customers, around 97% of eligible low-income households have yet to take advantage of specially discounted superfast broadband deals which could save them around £144 a year, Ofcom noted.
It called on providers put a greater focus on promoting social tariffs and making sign-up easier.
“The cost-of-living crisis is putting unprecedented strain on household budgets. It is essential that the industry puts its customers first, and focuses on what more it can do to help support them,” said Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s networks and communications group director.
“This includes a much stronger emphasis on offering and promoting social tariffs, as well as thinking carefully about whether significant price rises can be justified at a time when the finances of their customers are under such pressure.”
I guess this has contributed somewhat to BTs recent SP slide. Will be investing to see what BT has built-in into the Balance Sheet as a provision for doubtful debt and what has been expensed as bad debt thus far.
I never thought I’d see 134p again, lowest point of last year after 200p x twice. But 129, what can I say, Battersea couldn’t rehome this dog of a share.
Indeed Nige, all bids welcome, nothing accepted under £3.