BT to gobble EE for £12.5bn – BTEE phone home BT is in talks to acquire EE for £12.5bn. BT had been eying up taking O2 from Telefonica. The former national telco said on Monday that it expects "significant synergies" from absorbing EE, mainly through cuts "network and IT rationalisation, back-office consolidation and savings on procurement, marketing and sales costs". BT …
According to this interesting page, in Norwegian but with nice videos, suspicious Aftenposten journalists took fifty thousand readings using a specially modified GSM mobile phone.
They were shocked to discover around one hundred and twenty-two incidents/anomalies consistent with many highly active, even dual-band, completely genuinely FAKE GSM base-stations in Norway!
People targeted included PM, MoD, Central Bank, parliament, Embassies, major businesses... potentially anyone with a GSM in Oslo; a spokesman from PST (Norway's MI5), Arne Christian Haugstøyl, came out with "we warn persons ... against discussing sensitive matters on the mobile phone"
I'd say that all of the no-doubt similarly illegal GSM systems in UK will be off for a few days, whilst this storm blows-over, unless the Daily-Mail picks up on it. Aftenposten couldn't get any comment from their BT equivalent. Is it a good time to invest in EE? - well maybe if A5/3 gets a roll-out in UK, (that would be a stop-gap solution to have a partially secure algo whilst GSM is buried and the spectrum refarmed for 900MHz LTE)
English translation (without the really nice pics & videos) is at http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/Secret-surveillance-of-Norways-leaders-detected-7825278.html
Agreed. I despise BT ever since being ripped off by them a few years back and I really was not looking forward to having to jump network from O2 if they were bought by BT (seeing as they're one of the only networks that provides a signal where I live). To all EE customers, you have my sympathy...
Thanks, but after hearing about this I won't be staying an EE customer for long. I would hope that this will be enough to push everyone else on the network out of their phone inertia too- the only reason I can imagine that anybody stays. I have been a BT customer and I will not be one again.
>Thanks, but after hearing about this I won't be staying an EE customer for long
Are you not going to even wait to see if the deal gets done?
That said, I'm an EE customer and I do not wish to do business with BT either. Personally, I'll probably stay with EE until they try to sell me BT line.
The real problem for me is that we're gradually reaching a point where I don't want to do business with any of the companies offering services that I need because of the buy-ups, so I may end up just having to lump it.
" A near monopoly broadband/landlind provider in the UK, will own a major mobile provider."
If OFCOM were competent they'd require the new BT to demerge Openreach. Shareholders would still own both operations, so no loss to them, and they could elect to keep or sell either BT's service business or the Openreach monopoly according to their investment objectives.
Unfortunately we all know OFCOM couldn't find their own arse with both hands. FFS, they don't even require BT to have separate statutory accounts for Openreach, which is virtually unheard of in regulating asset based businesses.
So expect this deal to be rubber stamped.
" A near monopoly broadband/landlind provider in the UK, will own a major mobile provider."
Ah, takes me back to the late 80's when all you could see round here were BT landlines and subsequently BT Cellnet masts...
Remember when we owned that company? But then the powers-that-be decided that privatising would give us cheaper prices, and subsequently opened the industry up to multiple players when they realised that wasn't working.
Good to see that we're gradually regressing back to being spanked by one big company (it'll be cheaper cos of the synergies I'm told). That we used to own.
"Plus the £22.5bn raised from 3G auctions that wouldn't have happened had we had a single state owned operator. And the many billions gained from the sale of BT. And the corporation tax from its profits."
The money "raised" from the 3G auctions though - who do you think paid for it (and the effort required to run the sale)? You - the consumer. All you've done is be taxed in a massively inefficient way, allowing a portion of that to be carved off to private equity funds.
As for the corporation tax on its profits - you realise that we'd still have that plus the actual profits?
It's like the people who were very excited to purchase shares in the Royal Mail's IPO and get very excited that they now own part of it. They always owned it, but are somehow pleased to be able to pay for something they already owned.
I'm not a complete communist though, I'm well aware that the broadband market we have now has driven faster speeds and that BT would probably still be doing 512Kbps broadband if it weren't for LLU and competition, but let's not get excited about us going back to single companies and expecting that we'll benefit from it.
"BT would probably still be doing 512Kbps broadband if it weren't for LLU and competition"
BTwholesale and BT Retail and indeed BT Openreach might well still be in the dark ages, but if you look into who's behind the last few sets of standards that allow repurposing of telephone wires intended for voice decades ago, to now permit speeds unimaginable even fifteen years ago, among the various contributors are folk from BT R+D (as was) in Martlesham. It has another name now, the name is irrelevant, but what they do there is not so irrelevant.
The rest of your post makes perfect sense.
"Remember when we owned that company? But then the powers-that-be decided that privatising would give us cheaper prices, and subsequently opened the industry up to multiple players when they realised that wasn't working."
I think you've introduced an extra step there. Competition was introduced alongside privatisation - first with Mercury (owned by C&W, also a privatised former goverment monopoly) and then other operators applied for licences. Later, the license requirements were eased and now anyone can set up a telco.
TPTB were right about one thing though - prices are far cheaper than they were and amongst the lowest in Europe. That's one of the reasons for takeovers and mergers and all that stuff - owners are trying to get out because low prices means there's not much profit in UK telecoms - notice that there's not so much eagerness to sell mobile operators elsewhere in Europe.
"I don't want "synergies","
Then you're in luck, because there won't be any, and the actual impact is that BT have to recover more costs.
All those deal fees, legal costs, restructuring costs, and a particularly big and fat acquisition premium are going to create a huge slug of "goodwill" on the balance sheet that needs to be amortised away. The only way that will happen will be either for BT to take lower profits on EE than the current owners (which isn't going to happen), or for BT to increase the average revenue per user and the average margin per user to EE customers. That's what happened every time the UK cable companies got traded.
The BT fat cats can dress it up all they want, but there's a harsh reality to this sort of deal: Customer's get screwed while The City enjoy big bonuses.
Yes, production is indeed up but only according to the "official statistics".
Actually, I think market competition is a good thing, but that isn't what we have (apart from small businesses). Cutting costs, increasing efficiency and being competitive are all-too-often rallying cries used to worsen the conditions of employees while corporations seek monopoly or near-monopoly status through acquisition etc.
There was an interesting talk on TED a while back where someone had used network analysis techniques to investigate patterns of ownership based on published company reports. I think the conclusion was that half a dozen bodies own just about everything.
Can't see HMG allowing that. All GCHQ/home office/government/Army-Navy Air Force traffic delivered over a network owned by a foreign power; I don't think so!
Will GCHQ/Home Office/HMG be able to perform anonymous surveillance if DT are in control?
However with TTIP, who knows who will own what.
Can't see HMG allowing that. All GCHQ/home office/government/Army-Navy Air Force traffic delivered over a network owned by a foreign power; I don't think so!"
They don't seem that bothered that BT is using a lot of hardware designed and built by Huawei, A company suspected of spying for the Chinese.
"Can't see HMG allowing that. All GCHQ/home office/government/Army-Navy Air Force traffic delivered over a network owned by a foreign power; I don't think so!"
They don't seem that bothered that BT is using a lot of hardware designed and built by Huawei, A company suspected of spying for the Chinese."
I doubt that sensitive government or military traffic rides the public networks unless there's some form of hiding in plain sight going on.
Yeah. I was getting ready to switch from Sky to EE. Anyone but BT! Previously I was going to go back to Be, being unaware that Sky had bought them.
I believe that will mean there will be only Sky and BT serving this area now. I.e Sky, BT, PlusNet, EE. I don't recall seeing Be as an ISP for here last time I looked, though it had been for several years. This is rapidly becoming an appalling situation.
Yes, just checked. There's also TalkTalk. What a fucking joke.
Actually Sky hasn't bought Be. O2 kept it when they sold their customer broadband network to Sky. (Actually they sold the customer as the network was BTs).
Since then, O2 has been heavily investing in boosting this network in the background before relaunching a fibre broadband service.
It will be business only at first but eventually, we never know.
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