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Https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-68209712
One of the reason the share price is getting hammered. £5B up for grabs ad Cityfibre is being awarded a large chunk of it.
On another note; Why doesn't BT bang on peoples doors when they have installed fibre (FTTP) all the Altnets and VM do!
They have just FTTP's half my village and nobody knows about it!
About 97,000 homes in seven counties will benefit from "lightning fast" broadband as part of a £5bn project, the government has said.
Contracts worth £181m will bring faster speeds to Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire.
Ministers said Project Gigabit would give households access to speeds of 1,000Mbps (megabits per second).
Work could start this summer.
Internet speeds across the UK average about 73Mbps.
The government said it wanted 85% of the population to have access to gigabit broadband by 2025, with the whole country benefiting from the same speed by 2030.
Commercial companies were expected to deliver the necessary upgrades to much of the UK, but the target cannot be hit without government intervention in "hard-to-reach" areas.
The speed of the project's delivery had been criticised by the Rural Services Network.
Some of the areas included in Project Gigabit:
Bedfordshire: Millbrook and Haynes
Berkshire: Areas around Maidenhead and Windsor
Buckinghamshire: Bow Brickhill and Stoke Goldington
Hertfordshire: areas around Hertsmere, Hitchin and Harpenden
Leicestershire: Bosworth and Charnwood
Northamptonshire: Ecton and Greatworth,
Warwickshire: Kenilworth and Rugby
The independent provider, CityFibre, will be installing the new services.
After a three-year battle, the Collective Action on Land Lines (CALL) campaign will this month finally take national broadband ISP and phone provider BT to trial as part of a £600m class-action lawsuit, which alleges that the UK telecoms giant overcharged 2.3 million of its landline-only phone customers between 2015 and 2018.
The original claim was first raised at the start of 2021 through UK law firm Mishcon de Reya, which is acting on behalf of a former Ofcom telecoms consultant – Justin Le Patourel. At issue is Ofcom’s 2016/17 review of the narrowband market (here and here), which found that landline-only customers (i.e. those who didn’t take a cheaper broadband bundle) had been “getting poor value for money compared to those who buy bundles of landline, broadband and/or pay-TV services.”
NOTE: The case also seeks compensation for customers who took both a broadband service and a BT landline, albeit not together as a bundle (i.e. customers paid more for the individual services).
The review also found that customer bills for line rental had risen significantly since 2009, while at the same time BT’s costs (wholesale) for providing the service had fallen. But this does ignore the fall in calling volumes that hit related revenues (other link costs may have also been excluded) – a key weighting factor for operators when setting retail prices.
Nevertheless, Ofcom put pressure on BT to respond, and the operator did so in 2018 by voluntarily cutting the line rental charge for c.900,000 vulnerable landline-only customers (reduction of £7 per month), while at the same time capping any subsequent overall increases to line rental and call charges to inflation (here) – this was again extended in 2020 for another 5 years (here). CALL’s campaign uses much of this as the basis for their wider overcharging claim.
CALL’s Case Goes to Trial
The latest development is that, after a series of battles in the appeals court, which BT lost (here), the case will finally go to a full trial on Monday 29th January 2024 and the court expects to finish hearing all evidence by 1st March 2024. In theory, a victory for Justin Le Patourel could force BT to pay out up to £600m in compensation to consumers (up to £500 each), although such headline figures are often optimistic.
The campaign has also been approved to represent all affected BT customers, unless they decide to opt out. This means that if you purchased a BT landline without broadband any time between October 2015 and April 2018 (October 2015 – today, for certain business customers), or you purchased a BT landline with broadband (from BT or another company) – but not under the same contract – any time after October 2015 to today, you will automatically become a class member in the claim.
The rules prevent CALL’s case being backdated even further.
Erik,
I have always re-invested my BT dividends. To answer your question I would only re-invest up to £1.80 - £2.00 based on my last 8 years of dividends
Date Cost Per Share
14-Sep-23 119.50p
07-Feb-23 134.21p
13-Sep-22 147.88p
08-Feb-22 199.84p
04-Feb-20 167.23p
10-Sep-19 164.72p
05-Feb-19 235.81p
04-Sep-18 225.47p
06-Feb-18 245.75p
05-Sep-17 296.94p
07-Feb-17 314.53p
06-Sep-16 398.30p
09-Feb-16 474.51p
08-Sep-15 438.29p
I know you can check these yourself and I have removed the quantity of shares I received. My share holding is comprised of Sharesave, direct share and dividends so the price I have bought the shares for varies massively. BDYOR
Does anyone have a reference to where this comment from the Guardian came from?
"A government spokesperson said it would “not hesitate to act” to protect BT from foreign takeover if necessary...."
Or have they just made it up!
Apparently the merger was approved today
The UK’s competition watchdog has provisionally cleared the £31bn merger of Virgin Media and O2, paving the way for the creation of a “national champion” to challenge BT.
The deal values Virgin Media at £18.7bn and O2 at £12.7bn.
BT & EE is valued at £15bn!