Cosmic timing to the launch of Virgin's Project Lightning by cloud-hopping Sir Itchy Brastrap and his LibertyMedia sugar-daddies.

This is how it panned out...

Thursday a.m. BT placed £1bn of new stock at £4.55 to part-finance the purchase of EE; those new shares offered at a 1% discount to Wednesday�s close of £4.60.

Friday a.m. the cumbersome incumbent was caught off-balance; by the jaw-dropping announcement of Virgin's £3bn plan to spread her legs, and expand her cable network by more than a third.

By the close of trade on Friday, BT's stock was at £4.39, down 2.4 per cent.

Would love to see the who, what, where and why, of the timing to Virgin's announcement!

No matter, as long as we get cable here in Little Piddlington, that's what counts.

Edited by deleted (Fri 13-Feb-15 22:15:39)

to be fair BT only did so much in rural areas due to political intervention.

VM are going to do whats most profitable which means highest population density.

If you dont like it why dont you move to a city area?

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

If you dont like it why dont you move to a city area?

What is the point of having two homes in cities? I already spend enough time close to London and getting away to Scotland is great. People where I am there would love to have a cable TV service - chance of that is nil. As I said, BT are upgrading at their cost with no subsidy - and exchange with 3-400 residential and maybe 20 business lines.

aclly that not Virgin that INFL -- INFl no broadband choice only INFL

virgin have made very little impact into new build if any

if little piddington is where i think it is near Bicester and i assume its not going to be near -VM current footprint and i assume that VM will only go where it makes commercial sense to them and its close to their exisiting cable footprint --

are you not covered under BDUK or perhaps you could investigate prviate funding -- number of villages not that far from Bicester have done that

Edited by deleted (Sat 14-Feb-15 14:22:56)

In reply to a post by Fastman2:

aclly that not Virgin that INFL -- INFl no broadband choice only INFL

virgin have made very little impact into new build if any

There are 3 Barratt / David Wilson developments I have looked at properties in around the Leeds and Wakefield area and all are VM only. These are all mid-construction so seems there is a deal here.

Excellent news. We will see what effect this has on BT's next move.

Certainly after all the noise BT made about spending about £1.6 billion to build and £0.9 billion to operate their overlay network of 18 million premises VM will milk the PR of spending £3 billion to cover less than 1/4 that.

Let's see if BT can really open the chequebook for something other than sports rights. I am not convinced less than £100 of CapEx per premises passed will cut it this time. See how deep their pockets can go given they, unlike VM, will have to wholesale.

It put VM in pole position when the greater speeds are really needed . BT has maxed out its legacy network it has no where to go without putting more fibre in

VM has been good at upselling to triple ply and cable is becoming increasingly important to delivering TV and the next generation of Ultra HD will need a greater bandwidth

VM would not be investing this sort of money without seeing a return on it

Hmm interesting - are you that the only limitation on sending data over a single fibre is the hardware both ends? There are quite a few 40Gb and 100Gb links over single fibres in the BT network.

I was a bit surprised that BT were going to shell out for G.fast, but a poster on another forum(WWWombat) has pointed out that BT already knew about the recent announcement by Sckipio -

At least, that has been the conventional view. Earlier today, BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) CEO Gavin Patterson told analysts that -- following technology improvements during the past six months -- BT would be able to use G.fast effectively over much longer copper loops than it had originally thought possible.

"There has been a breakthrough on G.fast in the last quarter and we now see a way to deliver it from street cabinets rather than just distribution points," he said. "That means we can build on existing investments."

http://www.lightreading.com/gigabit/dsl-vectoring-gf...

So basically it seems not that BT has suddenly become ambitious in its plans for broadband but that technological breakthroughs have presented it with a gift it probably doesn't deserve.

Edited by Spud2003 (Sun 15-Feb-15 20:47:34)