BT boss to rivals: Stop talking Britain down
Telecom boss hits back after broadband service is lambasted as slower than in Kazakhstan
JOHN Petter, chief executive of BT Consumer, has a sharp response to his rivals who are running a campaign aimed at fixing Britain’s supposedly broken internet but clearly targeted at its custodian BT: stop talking the country down.
BT is under fire. The regulator Ofcom is planning to force it to make changes to Openreach, its £5billion business which owns the UK’s infrastructure of wires and cables used to access the internet and which rivals accuse of providing poor service and low internet speeds. For BT’s rivals, Ofcom’s plan is a capitulation: they want Openreach sold off entirely to create an independent company.
‘In my view our rivals are talking the country down. If
I doubt Dido and the others will be planning to move away any time soon
you look at the big five countries in Europe – France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK – then the UK has better superfast broadband coverage, better speeds, and a much bigger e-commerce business than any of them,’ he says. ‘I think they are seeking commercial advantage by gaming the regulatory system.’
The Fix Britain’s Internet campaign is a rallying point for consumers and businesses, set up by BT’s rivals, to put pressure on the regulator. TalkTalk’s boss Dido Harding, along with executives from Vodafone and Sky, has compared BT unfavourably with countries not normally thought of as at the forefront of digital provision, including Kazakhstan.
‘All they have to do is to sell the product, after all. Anyway, I doubt Dido and the others will be planning to move to Kazakhstan themselves to sample the delights of ultrafast broadband any time soon. Of course, there are people who have not got access to the right speeds and are frustrated, but talking the country down will not help them.’
Petter is the 46-year-old, Oxfordeducated boss of BT’s consumer division, responsible for providing broadband to BT customers as well as BT Sport and television, telephone landlines and BT mobile. It was Petter who began the move to bring call centres back to the UK from India, after years of complaints from customers, hiring 1,000 UK staff with plans for a further 1,000 by next April.
‘We are changing people’s job descriptions – it sounds a small thing, but it’s significant because now they are responsible for solving the consumer’s problems and not just passing them up the line to someone else,’ he says.
‘We’ve brought call centres back to the UK because the staff agreed to work evenings and weekends and that was key. The problem in India is that a lot of our call centre staff were of short tenure because many of them were doing it until they became software engineers. So we had a quick turnover of people. The language differences meant there was often a lack of empathy for customers because people stuck to a script which can infuriate people.’
Petter has also led BT’s charge into spending big on sports rights.
‘We had tried to secure access to Sky’s content for years through commercial and legal resources but that didn’t work,’ he says. ‘But BT is a big company, we can afford to make big investments. It was our success providing communications for the London Olympics in 2012 which gave us the confidence to do it. It went brilliantly and showed us we could broadcast TV through fibre broadband.’
BT moved into sports rights amid concerns that Sky’s dominance in the field was costing BT broadband customers – by some estimates more than half of BT subscribers who switched to Sky did so because of football.
For the season which has just kicked off, BT is broadcasting nearly all its Premier League games on Saturday evenings and pitching itself to viewers as ‘Four Competitions, One Venue’. This compares with Sky, which calls itself the ‘Home of the Premier League’, and which has the rights to three times more Premier League games than BT. ‘Sky has been a major force in sports broadcasting but because of its exclusive hold on rights, the game had become narrowed. We wanted to broaden it out again. I always remember the 1980 FA Cup final when Trevor Brooking scored with his head against Arsenal to win it for my team, West Ham. Back then everything stopped for the FA Cup, streets were empty. We thought we’d lost some of that – the Olympics made us realise it – and we have tried to bring football back to the people. Sky has its suited and booted pundits and we’ve taken a more relaxed approach.’
Noble sentiments, of course, but they have not come cheap: the live rights to broadcast Premier League matches cost BT and Sky £5.1billion.
Petter uses the football rights to reduce churn – the number of customers who move away – and to attract new customers and sell more BT products to existing ones. BT has also offered BT Sport free for six months to the subscribers of EE, now owned by BT.
Sky is set to launch its own mobile network shortly, giving the two giants another point of contact to knock heads. Petter claims his tactics work: ‘BT Consumer makes more in profit than it did in 2012,’ he says.
Premier League boss Richard Scudamore said recently he ‘wouldn’t ever, ever think’ that there would be reason why the price would go down. Does Petter agree?
‘I think Scudamore has done a terrific job: it’s the most viewed league in the world and last season’s win by Leicester presented a spectacle that was viewed across the globe. But there are limits – it depends on what people are willing to pay in the end,’ he says.
BT customers who pay from £31.99 a month for TV, broadband and landline services are not charged to watch Premier League matches, while those who take just broadband and landline services for at least £23.99 have to pay £6 extra a month.
Petter reckons he has some leeway on prices and intends to bid for the rights again. After all, football has been good for BT and Petter must be doing something right if rivals are looking yearningly at Kazakhstan.
It’s the most viewed league in the world but there are limits to what people will pay