Gavin Patterson sacked

Looks like the email address for Gavin Patterson will be changing folks......

https://www.ft.com/content/dbf4c0d8-6ae1-11e8-b6eb-4...

A better link that doesn't require a signup to view: BBC News - BT boss Gavin Patterson to step down.

But yeah, it doesn't look good for him.

Paul

I wouldn�t call that sacked TBH.

It�s not like gross misconduct is it, though the sports thing was a duff move in my book.

you dont need gross misconduct to be sacked, its not sacked like a low level employee is typically sacked but he was forced out.

Sports in my view is a clear mistake.

The EE purchase was worth around £12.5 billion,& don't forget the sports rights purchase,could have bought a lot of fibre for the UK for that amount...

Edited by Nightglow (Fri 15-Jun-18 08:21:39)

But as discussions here have shown, ROI for fibre will be painfully slow.

And BT still owns EE - and that will be "money well spent". Although the previous owners must be feeling the pain with the drop in the BT share price.

I think EE may be an ok purchase, BT as a telco company needed to get back in the mobile space, the issue is I think they may have overpaid, unless they aggressively ramp up pricing its going to take a while to make that pay back.

Sports I think is a clear mistake.

Another mistake was failing to get ofcom to agree to retire copper as well as to make other wholesale regulation more favourable to the BT group, that failure is making the FTTP business case far less attractive.

BT are going to have to take some pain, FTTP is inevitable, may as well roll it out and get it over and done with, things like g.fast are just ways of delaying it, but as discovered g.fast only from cabinets is a very limited product. If they pull out of EPL sports rights, it will recover some cash flow to ease that pain.

As I said in previous posts, the shares my family owns we dont care about dividends, we dont care about short term profits, but we do care about the value of the shares. The performance has been horrific.

Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 15-Jun-18 09:11:46)

FTTP is on way, i.e. 3 million in 2020 still puts them ahead of others, suspect Virgin Media will be second at 2 million (RFOG half of Project Lightning) with Vodafone in third at 1 million.

G.fast gives a way of stopping a big loss to virgin if 100 Mbps or more becomes the default of what people buy, and if others don't stay on top of congestion it may be the clever buy in urban areas for gamers. Remember FTTP is not immune from congestion, having a Gig is brilliant for near instant downloads of Fortnite patches but if latency due to congestion is wandering around your game play means you might as well stay on the bus.

Not winning against Ofcom on several fronts was probably a decider, though a new Group CEO that pushes Openreach is actually not a popular thing, look at recent Ofcom complaints about Openreach still being steered by group.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

FTTP is on way, i.e. 3 million in 2020 still puts them ahead of others, suspect Virgin Media will be second at 2 million (RFOG half of Project Lightning) with Vodafone in third at 1 million.

G.fast gives a way of stopping a big loss to virgin if 100 Mbps or more becomes the default of what people buy, and if others don't stay on top of congestion it may be the clever buy in urban areas for gamers. Remember FTTP is not immune from congestion, having a Gig is brilliant for near instant downloads of Fortnite patches but if latency due to congestion is wandering around your game play means you might as well stay on the bus.

Not winning against Ofcom on several fronts was probably a decider, though a new Group CEO that pushes Openreach is actually not a popular thing, look at recent Ofcom complaints about Openreach still being steered by group.

G.Fast still waiting for it to go live at my cab (installed summer last year) here in Bath, & this city was a G FAst trial area,total joke.

Any idea if buying the sports rights lead to a large enough increase in business to justify the cost?

Was a small jump in turnover initially but growth stagnated.

In reply to a post by Nightglow:

G.Fast still waiting for it to go live at my cab (installed summer last year) here in Bath, & this city was a G FAst trial area,total joke.

Its probably on hold until the areas infrastructure is all in place, maybe the exchange also needs updating for G.FAST.

Our Exchange and area have been upgraded for Ultrafast however G.FAST is not available.
But there is work by our exchange referring to infrastructure etc.

So I say just wait.

Paul

In reply to a post by PaulKirby:

In reply to a post by Nightglow:

G.Fast still waiting for it to go live at my cab (installed summer last year) here in Bath, & this city was a G FAst trial area,total joke.

Its probably on hold until the areas infrastructure is all in place, maybe the exchange also needs updating for G.FAST.

Our Exchange and area have been upgraded for Ultrafast however G.FAST is not available.
But there is work by our exchange referring to infrastructure etc.

So I say just wait.

Paul

There are cabs with G Fast pods & available to order in Bath.

Without lots of data on what pubs are paying and how many hard to say.

Considering that one of it's main competitors, Sky, owns the rights to many sproting events and it moved into BT's key markets of telephone and Internet access, could they have afforded not to attempt to try and compete to stem the migration away?

On the mobile question, although EE is far better equipped now in terms of the amount of spectrum it owns, in hindsight was it a good idea to spin off what became O2?

In terms of infrastructure, I think it might have been better for the Government to back a full fibre roll out via Openreach as it would benefit far more people and businesses.

I am still very much of the opinion that Openreach ought to be wrested from BT's control and converted to a mutually owned company that is owned by all of the providers that use it's services, including BT.

Doing this would probably put paid to allegations of favourable treatment of it's parent.

Spinning of O2 a disaster of a move, but they cant turn back time.

A problem that BT have still not shaken off is their long term vision is lacking, they struggle to see past the next 2-4 years in planning.

The TV was supposed to reduce churning to SKY and has clearly worked to a degree as BT are still the biggest player.

I am in no doubt that punters want content and particularly football content more than they want ultrafast speeds.

In my experience these guvnors lose the plot when they start seeing beyond the next 2-4 years.

O2 was demerged because of the debts of a previous CEO's long term vision and it's resultant affect on the share price from what I can remember.

Edited by deleted (Sat 16-Jun-18 22:02:14)

In reply to a post by techguy:

In terms of infrastructure, I think it might have been better for the Government to back a full fibre roll out via Openreach as it would benefit far more people and businesses.
...
Doing this would probably put paid to allegations of favourable treatment of it's parent.

And also resulted in being taken to the ECJ.

In reply to a post by partial:

The TV was supposed to reduce churning to SKY and has clearly worked to a degree as BT are still the biggest player.

I am in no doubt that punters want content and particularly football content more than they want ultrafast speeds.

They spent a great deal of money on the football rights. There does not appear to be any evidence that this was a financial success and the person responsible has lost his job.

Football clearly attracts some, but I would find it a strong disincentive, as essentially you have to pay towards something I would not want.

75% of the market is occupied by providers that offer football.

Which market? Apart from BT what broadband supplier includes football in the price?

Yes, BT bid far to much for 3G.

Have you looked at the current BT package lineup? i.e. the full BT Sport lineup is limited to some products now i.e. it is not a free for all on consumers

Also factor in what pubs and clubs pay for ability to show matches

If there was no money in football you can be pretty sure Sky would dump it asap

BT does not include football, this is part of an additional package and has little to do with their broadband provision.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Have you looked at the current BT package lineup? i.e. the full BT Sport lineup is limited to some products now i.e. it is not a free for all on consumers

No I had not, I recall the previous 'free offer, having a separate charge makes more sense so long as the charge covers BT's Sport costs. They claim to have 9.3m broadband customers. Only 1,7m have TV (BT + Plusnet + EE)

Also factor in what pubs and clubs pay for ability to show matches

If there was no money in football you can be pretty sure Sky would dump it asap

Sky were reported as having bet the business on football and for them it has been a success. If BT's expenditure on football was a financial success I would have thought that they would brag about. There are about 30.000 commercial premises have BT sport.

Rupert Murdoch and Alan Sugar were pretty instrumental in setting up the Premier League as Murdoch wanted something guaranteed to drive sales of his Sky Satellite TV service which had borged BSB and Sugar owned Spurs and wanted Amstrad to sell more decoders to Sky.

Spurs would also get some cash from the football rights auctions.

Don't forget you don't need BT Broadband or BT TV in order to get BT Sport, it is available as an add on to a Sky satellite subscription.

In reply to a post by ian72:

Don't forget you don't need BT Broadband or BT TV in order to get BT Sport, it is available as an add on to a Sky satellite subscription.

As well as virgin.

I get the whole lot of sky & Bt for far less via virgin, which includes far faster internet.

In reply to a post by JohnR:

As well as virgin.

I get the whole lot of sky & Bt for far less via virgin, which includes far faster internet.

Is that most of the Sky satellite channels received via the Internet?

Sky and BT Sport have wholesale agreements with Virgin for carriage of the channels over the cable TV infrastructure

So not received the Internet by the usual definitions e.g. a Sky Sports Pass on NOW TV

Thank you for the clarification.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

Thank you for the clarification.

As the saying goes '' Every day is a School Day ''

reducing churn means nothing if it loses you money.

BT is not a new early start company where customer growth comes above profits, its an established company with decades of history, so investing in expensive football rights and then losing money from it is not a success, what is particularly nasty about it is that its a very short term strategy, the rights are only purchased for 3 years in advance, BT gain no long term assets from the investment.

Also I wouldnt consider it to have a proven net gain on churn either, the football rights is one of the primary reasons I left BT, as not long after the rights were acquired they started sharp price rises on their other products to subsidise it and I decided I didnt want to subsidise their sports customers and so left for another provider.

Edited by Chrysalis (Tue 19-Jun-18 11:40:13)

you know you can offer football without buying rights directly right? you can resell sky sports. Thats what virgin media do.

Sky are struggling to make it work.

The last deal is worth less per game, and overall as well. Sky have been raising prices on their products way above inflation to subsidise the lower profit per sports customer problem they have, and one of the reasons sky are branching out into other things is they are losing confidence in football as a long term profit driver for them.

There is also clear differences between BT and sky.

Sky have been known for football since 1992, and people still see sky now as the place to go for football, they air more games and they now have the rights to all the first picks, e.g. manchester derby, it be on sky, the leics city EPL title win, all of our last 9 games and spurs last 9 games were live on sky, BT got none of them.
In terms of internet infrastructure, sky have unbundled exchanges, brought the easynet network. So own a internet core. But compared to what BT have which is a fully meshed nationwide network, they own the local loop in most of the country, wholesale provider for most isp's and even lease out connectivity to competitors like sky. The two companies are in different places and have different core sources of revenue so the importance of EPL rights on either company I feel isnt comparable.

We will know in 3 years if the EPL rights is decided to be a wrong path for BT, when the next rights come up for auction, for now they committed for another few years as an auction has just ended.

Sky appear to mirror my thoughts by offering punters football and being very reluctant to offer higher speed broadband.

BT of course are a smaller company than SKY but they appear to be doing alright in broadband customer numbers despite the negative 'insight' offered on the thread.