back to article BT's not at home to Mr Profit, but its lordly boss probably isn't too fussed

The past few weeks over at BT Towers have been busy, fraught and disruptive. But there was no ray of sunshine in the telecom giant's latest financial results out today. The company reported flat revenue growth and a significant decline in pre-tax profit this morning for the quarter that ended on 30 June. It pulled in total …

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  1. Magister

    Li'l Technical Note - and me

    >>shares down nearly 2 per cent to £335.50 <<

    £335 a share? Afraid not; your decimal point is in the wrong place. (Hint; the prices shown on the trading website are in pence.) So the real price is £3.3550 (although it's now down to £3.32 at lunch time)

    If they were really over £300 a share, I'd cash mine in and bugger off somewhere on a very long holiday; probably long eneough to see me reach retirement age. Oh well, I can still dream!

  2. SW10
    FAIL

    El Reg takes short-term City-type view?

    So are you unhappy about a company taking a long-term view?

    His Nibs (and the thousands of people who keep the multicoloured BT beachball turning) haven't done too badly - you can look back to a share price of just 72p in March 2009.

    Costs are still going down, despite some chunky investments for the future (football and fibre). Seems pretty OK to me - usually we like to whinge about companies who don't take a view of the future. You'd be all over them if it was BT (or any other provider) taking a short-term view...

    (Disclosure: I'm a modest and happy shareholder.)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: El Reg takes short-term City-type view?

      No what you should do, is ram as many people onto an already overcrowded backbone, invest bugger all in new rollouts, then cry foul when they don't win any contracts.

      Alternatively, buy out an existing decent provider and grind it down to you own substandard piece of crap service, buy removing the bits that make the original company any good in a race to the bootom.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hate paying LINE RENTAL? Sign this...

    http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/52872

    1. Steven Jones
      Angel

      Re: Hate paying LINE RENTAL? Sign this...

      A particularly idiotic e-petition showing zero understanding of the costs involved. The vast majority of the cost of the phone line is in the infrastructure of the local distribution network. Quite apart from the fact the local distribution network has a real value (bear in mind it was sbeold by the government to the shareholders), and those people, pension funds and the like, are due at least some return, there is the little matter that it costs a lot to maintain as ducts, connections, telegraph poles, drop cables all deteriorate. Then rates have to be paid on the network infrastructure including the necessary ducts, cabinets, poles and exchange buildings.

      15% of the cost of a phone line? Forget it. You think any organisation can actually provided a physical path to each property for about £14 per year exc VAT (which is about 15% of the regulated price of providing the loop).

      It's perfectly possible for any ISP to offer a non-voice ADSL service (in fact SDSL does that). Just provide a loop. That LLU operators find it necessary to provide a phone service too in order to make the entire package financially viable is just a fact of economic provision. Just inventing random percentages of existing line rental without taking into account the cost of provision is just being clueless.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Hate paying LINE RENTAL? Sign this...

        "That LLU operators find it necessary to provide a phone service too in order to make the entire package financially viable is just a fact of economic provision. "

        So bundling voice and data is nothing to do with telco/ISP attempts at dualplay tripleplay and quadplay vendor lockin then? (voice, broadband, TV, and the fourth one might be mobile...)

        Provision up poles and down holes is piss easy anyway in relative terms, any sucker with code powers can do it (though if they do try it, they really must be suckers).

        The UK big issue in the years since mass market DSL caught on seems to be faultfinding and maintaining reliable high performance services on a rather creaky old voice centric last mile network from which miracles can't be expected indefinitely. (Lots of clever diagnostic stuff in the DSL specs is just ignored).

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hate paying LINE RENTAL? Sign this...

      but all that will happen is the broadband price will go up, it will simply be a hidden fee. Unles you of course expect the entire infrastructure to be run, maintained and upgraded for free.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hate paying LINE RENTAL? Sign this...

      And I'm guessing that was created by you MBF...aka Michael Firth?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    £335.50 share price

    sell sell sell sell!!

  5. AndrueC Silver badge
    Holmes

    Meanwhile, 5.1 million BT customers are wired up to its broadband network via the firm's copper cabling.

    Technically all but a few thousand people are using 'the firm's copper cabling' since even their FTTC roll-out relies on it. True fibre connections are still a small minority of BT's connections. Of all the things the ASA has whined about I think that allowing FTTC or even VM to use the term 'fibre broadband' was wrong. Well - that and allowing 'unlimited' to be abused.

    1. Steven Jones

      indeed - both VM and FTTC services should be called fibre/copper hybrid. I think it was VM that started debasing the concept of fibre in this way. Once one starts it, then competitors have to follow.

      Not that there's anything wrong with hybrid provision in principle. After all, how many people using fibre LAN infrastructure in their home? It's all about the distance over the copper that matters. Making major changes to change the last few hundred metres to fibre gets disproportionately expensive over simply exploiting the copper loop. For most domestic customers, I suspect it will be more than enough where there's a cabinet within 500m or so; arguably even 1,000m.

      1. AndrueC Silver badge
        Go

        I suspect it will be more than enough where there's a cabinet within 500m or so; arguably even 1,000m.

        I agree. I think that 20Mb/s per member of the household is reasonable at the moment and probably for at least the rest of the decade. Given that the biggest bandwitdh hogging application is video and given the way codecs are developing it's hard to see why any individual would need more than 20Mb/s. I suppose the next generation of HD might push things a bit but I'm not convinced that's really going to take off.

        No I think it's the premises that fall below 20Mb/s per member that need to be sorted out and sorted out fast. It's just a shame that the RoI for those locations is inevitably poor to non-existent.

  6. xyz Silver badge

    BT....

    ...the Talk-Talk of telecoms, the Wonga of pay day loans, the crap in a crap sandwich

    1. deadmonkey

      Re: BT....

      "...the Talk-Talk of telecoms"

      Err...say what?

      There's only room for one talk talk in telecoms pal. And I paid handsomely to leave them and go back to bt.

  7. dephormation.org.uk
    Devil

    Ian Livingston & BT

    The people who imposed Phorm mass surveillance on their subscribers, and the web sites that served them.

    I don't trust either of them.

    1. Mr Young
      Thumb Up

      Hi dephormation

      It does seem really difficult to avoid this mass surveillance - in many ways I think humiliation may be the ultimate answer? I've rarely sometimes considered listening in (say spouse or child) and discarded the idea on moral grounds so where does that leave people that feel the need to slurp every little byte?

  8. OzBob

    Whatever happened to sewer-net as the last 100m?

    10 years ago this was touted as the solution to sh!t broadband. Combine with FTTC and the throughput should be sh!t-hot (Yes yes, I'm going!)

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