Member Info for Terraplane

Strange as it may seem to you I also see BT as a future cash cow, as long as the present management don't follow in the footsteps of their predecessors and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I am watching Jansen's progress closely, he's been there two years already and not much has changed, certainly not the bottom line. I don't think he knows what he's doing nor what the best options are, apart from continued cuts. He's kept his head down and his mouth shut so far, probably in an attempt to avoid too much scrutiny, but I might be wrong. See, the thing is, if BT CEOs had listened to the people who knew what they were talking about years ago, instead of hiring flocks of seagull managers who knew nothing except how to screw the company for all they could get, we wouldn't be having this conversation. The future could be golden but I'm not yet confident enough to sink more cash into this crippled company. Sell the TV division and Openreach and we might be onto a winner.
BT still own some of the key exchanges in London and other cities, they don't lease them all back. Regardless of whether BT or Telereal own them, until customers and services are migrated off the system X and AXE10 switches they can't be shut down and that is not happening anytime soon.

Blaming the CWU for BTs problems just shows how little you understand.
All BTs problems have come from the top. Bad management on a massive scale, resulting in crisis after crisis. The bloke with the tools has no influence on the disastrous decision making that has brought this company to the verge of extinction. Cable and Wireless was a different kind of company to BT. Yes, I worked at BT. It was my career. I saw first-hand how the people at the top took a massively profitable company and almost destroyed it because they didn't know what they doing. Furthermore, not one of them took any responsibility for their actions. All they took was the money. Vallance, Bonfield, Lord Marshall, Bland, Verwaayen, Livingston and Patterson, every one of them a chocolate teapot.
But who picks up the tab for their profligate corporate stupidity?
Step forward the long-suffering shareholders.
And yet, here you are blathering on about the CWU.
Perhaps history isn't your strong point.
I've already explained to you that closing down exchange buildings to sell is not a simple option, neither is it very cost-effective. Cutting the workforce has been the mantra of every successive CEO, although strangely enough it never includes the likes of them. This is because of the well-known game of corporate musical chairs where none of the chairs are ever removed when the music stops. BT needs to refocus itself and decide what it is they can actually make money from and then do it. My first move would be to sell off BT sport to some mug and then openreach. BT's strength is its core business and the people who work there. The rest is bells and whistles.

"It's clear that there are a lot of BT haters, but BT's one of the few truly British companies left. it amazes me how many people want BT to fail..."
BT isn't a British company as in owned by British shareholders or whose market is only British. Deutsche Telekcom owns 12% of the company for a start. It's not about hating BT, it's about the way the company has been run for the last 20 years. This should be a company with a healthy bank balance and a share price commensurate with its actual value. But due to hopeless CEOs who couldn't run a bath and legions of senior people whose talents, abilities and contributions were in direct opposition to their reward packages, the company has staggered from one crisis to another. Peter Bonfield's dream of world domination started the rot, building up £30billion debt buying companies that offered nothing but trouble. He was completely out of his depth. In comes Christopher Bland, who had little knowledge of working for a commercial business, who promptly sells the mobile business and delivers a rights issue to pay down the debt mountain built up by Bonfield. Then came Verwaayen and his catastrophic decision to buy junk equipment from Huawei that still resonates today. Following him came Livingston who thought that the only way to make money was by cost-cutting. His big idea was BT Television and BT sport. Both of which have cost billions and returned not a brass razoo. Add to that Barroult's fraudulent dealings and another crisis ensues. Enter Gorgeous Gavin, the shampoo salesman. Under his watch BT spent eye-watering sums on football and brass farthings on the network whilst our Italian outfit were cooking the books to the tune of several hundred million, putting the share price back to into the gutter. Oh yes, these hugely rewarded people really loved the company so much. Do me a favour. The only reason BT is still functioning at all is because of the highly-skilled and loyal people who spent long careers at a company that they did actually regard with some affection. As a shareholder since the beginning I think I have every right to vent spleen at the miserable frauds who did nothing but run the company firmly into the ground and then walk away with bulging bank balances and an moral vacuum. Not one of these prize plums has benefitted BT or the shareholders.

In 2009 the senior management of BT knew very well that older customers would take a hit and were unlikely to cause trouble. They knew that they could get away with it because people by and large are reluctant to change service providers, especially older people, notwithstanding the fact that in 2009 it was a lot more convoluted to change suppliers than it is now. They knew that the vast majority of the people who would suffer increased bills had nowhere else to go for landline-only services. The CEO at that time - Ian Livingston - had two things on his mind: 1) The share price had collapsed due to Francois Barrault's disastrous dealings in Global Services, leading to a £1.6 billion writedown. 2) The cost of getting live football on BT Vision.
So where there was an opportunity to screw the punters, regardless of the demographic, that opportunity was taken. This was a cold-blooded financial decision taken by people with cold blood. The trouble is that these people neither understood nor cared about their customers, least of all those who had been with BT forever. It may not be illegal but for a company like BT it certainly isn't going to get them any plaudits. BT's customer service record is consistently appalling because of the structure of the company and the fact that there are too many managers in BT who are only interested in keeping their backsides out of the bacon slicer, rather than doing what's right for both the company and the customers, especially in Openreach. Add to that the almost laughable dearth of talent and ability at the very top of the company and you have the perfect recipe for disaster. While morals have little to do with business, a lot of customers actually do have them. Being a shareholder in this company is sometimes akin to wearing a hair shirt and self-flagellating in penance.

Biden will huff and puff but nothing will happen. Oil is just too important to the world and until someone invents a way to run everything on fresh air and sunshine oil ain't going nowhere.
Follow the money not the rhetoric.

At the moment it's a monobo**ock, when it hits 1.50 it'll be a matching pair

140 is holding, it seems common sense is beginning to show fear the door...

I wonder where Barclays gets a figure of 47.2% from? Department of guesswork, I shouldn't wonder.
With the debt, the pension and the lack of decent management, sadly BT isn't going anywhere for some time yet. Probably £2 by next Christmas at best.

"Once PSTN is switched off, BT can close redundant Exchange sites en-masse"
And there's the rub.
Switching off System X and AXE 10 PSTN cannot be done en-masse. PSTN is here for years. You can blame Ben Verwaayen for that.

You have to remember that there are operational buildings with additional offices and buildings that are purely office space. The operational buildings won't be closed and the offices will remain. That leaves the workstyle buildings, such as Brentwood, which were built on the periphery of cities and the smaller office buildings outside the main cities. These are the buildings that were earmarked for closure. Most of the operational building offices house people who can work from home but those buildings also have switches, trunks and other essential kit that can't be moved so it makes sense to use those offices for people who can't do their job at home. The biggest problem is the resistance of those managers who don't want their staff to work from home because they want to be in control. So unless Jansen over rules these managers it will be difficult for BT to make any progress in restructuring the efficiency of how the estate is used. I had a desk in a central London operational building but I worked from home with a laptop 95% of the time. Other people in the office weren't allowed to work from home because their managers didn't trust them because they were dinosaurs. The buildings that house switches are the ones in the most valuable locations - like Mayfair - but the cost of closing these is economically prohibitive.

"Cars will be electric, trucks will be electric and busses too and our homes will be powered by electricity from onshore wind. Offshore wind, solar, tidal and wave generated electricity. Green hydrogen will be developed to allow its use in various modes of transport and battery storage will likewise be developed and refined."
Yes, sounds great, doesn't it?
But wrong.
Hydrogen - regardless of the colour - is not cheap or simple to produce, transport or store in quantities large enough to be of any practical value. It only occurs naturally in compounds such as water. It is highly inflammable, the most combustible gas there is. That's why they stopped using it in airships. Just producing enough to power a small gas turbine, after mixing it with natural gas, would cost more than the saving made. So hydrogen is a non-starter as a mainstream source of power. Similarly with battery power. Great idea but production is hugely expensive and the rare earth metals required cost fortunes to mine. Again, not suitable for industrial or domestic use.
Wind turbines? OK for producing a small percentage of the national grid output but to replace coal, gas or nuclear power there would have to be wind farms on every street corner and that's not a viable prospect. They produce electricity for nothing, yes, but they are still less efficient and costly to run than a power station. Same goes for wave power. Solar power is great as long as the sun shines, completely useless in the dark. Storing electricity isn't a cheap option either. A capacitor with enough storage capacity to power the average house would be as big as the house and a battery with sufficient power to drive all the household appliances, heat the water and keep the lights on doesn't exist.
As for electric cars, lorries and buses, these will only replace the combustion engine when battery technology has improved to the point where they are viable on a cost basis and that is years away, if not decades.
The green lobby are witless charlatans who believe in fairies.

There is no logic behind the falling SP, just fear, so follow the advice of Buffet and in 2-3 years you'll be smiling.
Today is not the bottom but it's pretty close, so tomorrow I'll be scooping up some more.

How do you defend BT in the market? There is no confidence in the company so we are where we are. There is the unmistakeable odour of death wafting over the bombed-out ruins of BT. Jansen has got previous in selling Worldpay, DuPlessis the same with SABMiller. These two know jack about the sector but they know about filling their pockets. I would like to think that there is a future for BT but I see no light at the end of the tunnel. Tech stocks are hoovering up all the money and will continue to do so. What I don't understand is how the tech buyers imagine the tech companies can operate without telecoms. Facebook and the rest are useless without telecoms. What use is a smartphone without internet? Maybe that's the way to sink the techies, collapse the telecoms sector by selling them out of business to buy Apple et al. Enjoy the bank holiday and hope the sun shines. We live in hope...

There are certainly opportunities, especially now that BT have a mobile product. Trouble is, all those ungrateful punters out there who still believe in having a telephone plugged into a socket. It would be a wonderful thing if they could be encouraged to join the 21st century, but mark my words, there's a lot of resistance out there. Some people just don't want to change, some think that mobiles are dangerous etc, etc. Just renting a PSTN line for voice calls is expensive, as you say. I wish BT could make magic happen but I fear that all we will get is an illusion.

Corporate customers, yes. Mrs Jones at No36 and my Granny, no.
The question is this: Are BT really going to cut off millions of domestic customers? I don't think so.
If, by some miracle, every last household is willing to shell out for broadband and VOIP capable equipment and BT has managed to get every exchange equipped with the necessary equipment AND planted the fibre, all by January 1st 2026, then we are good to go and the share price will get a good uptick.
Given the current uncertainty of everything, including possible buyouts/takeovers, and the fact that no other CP is investing a brass razoo in providing network, I'm more inclined to put my faith in lighting candles in St. Mary's. If the SP drops below a quid I might buy a few more just to add to my collection of scrap paper that I've had for years. Just in case. There's money in BT but not without the right strategy and I haven't seen any signs of life on that front.

Yes, there was a project in the Cardiff area but it was a failure. This was around 15 years ago. It was the pathfinder project for 21CN. Only 6 customers ever got working voice connections. It was all scrapped. Thing is, BT brought in so-called experts who designed it but plenty of BT engineers had already told senior managers it wouldn't work and why it wouldn't work They were spot on.

That's the plan...however, getting a single customer's PSTN over fibre is not an option unless it goes VOIP. Which brings us back to square one because unless BT or any other provider can convince punters to buy new equipment to replace their old phone, System X PSTN will have to keep going. We knew this was always going to be a problem but senior management ignored it.
Part of what we were doing was power saving and we contributed a lot of savings by turning off equipment that was just sitting there doing nothing. Conversely, a few years ago we actually brought a new processor switch into service, the first one for over 25 years. This was loaded up with exchanges from smaller processors which we then shut down. Opening the switch was almost cost-free because we used an old trunk switch but shutting the smaller processors saved loads of money in power and harvesting the re-useable cards and ancillary equipment. I planned this switch. There were plans to re-open 10 old trunk switches and five were completed by the time I left. I also know that the 2025 plan is not set in stone and never has been a realistic plan as far as engineering goes. The people at the top came up with a figure without really understanding what they were talking about. Getting all the fibre in will take longer than 2025. There's a lot of money still rolling in from PSTN so there's no hurry. The cost of dumping and replacing all the Huawei gear is another huge cost and another reason System X won't be switched off. The bigger worry is how BT fight off any takeover bid. Any prospective bid will almost certainly lead to asset stripping. Letting the nation's communications network fall into the hands of foreign interests is unthinkable but quite possible. As a shareholder I see nothing but misery for the foreseeable future.

Yes, Martlesham is still going.

When I left two years ago ISDN 30 was still a live product. We were harvesting cards all over the country to keep it going. There are still many thousands of customers still using ISDN 30. ISDN 2 is a dead duck but there are still a few working ports out there.
BT can't just switch off exchanges, it doesn't work like that. Customers still on copper - which is the vast majority - can't be cut off. An exchange isn't just a box with an on-off switch. Every PSTN switch is controlled by a processor and the processors control the network These are in big switch buildings and the program was to migrate all the smaller sites onto a core processor network. This is ongoing. The PSTN network is still critical to support everything else, including broadband. As long as broadband needs the PSTN network there won't be any switch off. In addition there are still more than 25 million punters using PSTN to make their phone calls.
BT should be a hugely profitable company, even with the pension debt, but so many poor decisions have been made by the previous managements. It would be nice to see someone with vision and knowledge run the company, rather than bean counters.

The PSTN won't be switched off in 2025. I doubt it will be switched off by 2030.
I worked on the voice network and I know that the plans are simply unachievable in the timescales they talk about.
The core network still has loads of Ericsson AXE10 equipment that can't be unloaded onto System X processors and while the System X processor network is being gradually slimmed down, there are not enough engineers with the necessary skills to do the work. I was involved in planning this project until I retired so I know what is going on. The biggest problem is that there is no viable system ready to replace the PSTN network. All the claims trumpeted about 21CN were made by people who had no background or knowledge of telecoms who were shipped in to project manage it. The ISDN is another problem. BT have never found anything to replace it. They were hoping customers would migrate to new equipment but they didn't. ISDN is still being used by a vast number of customers and they are not going to spend large sums of cash replacing switches and other equipment just to keep BT happy. The decisions made during Ben Vervaayen's time have proved to be a disaster for BT. He was the one who decided to buy Huawei and Fujitsu equipment, regardless of being told by expert engineers that it wouldn't work. He could have bought a better system that actually worked from Marconi, but he wanted to be seen as a global player, so Marconi and all its employees were sunk. The stuff BT got from Huawei and Fujitsu has never worked as a viable replacement for PSTN and never will. It was a total waste of money. BT did secret trials of what they hoped would replace System X and it was a total failure. After almost two years all they managed to get working on it was six customers for a few days. The trials were quietly folded up and the equipment ended up in the bin. So no, there won't be any big switch off, or switch over from PSTN by 2025.