Telecoms veteran slams business broadband deals
ANDY Hollingworth, a former director at telecoms group TalkTalk and now boss of business broadband provider Toople, has hit out at the ‘questionable practices’ of Big Six rivals selling to small firms.
He took aim at those selling broadband as a business service to small firms when he claimed it was no different to a normal household service. He claimed small firms found themselves competing for bandwidth with children playing games after school and during holidays.
Hollingworth, whose challenger company Toople was launched by tech entrepreneur David Breith and listed in May, said: ‘I’ve been in the telecoms industry since 1988, in the mobile, fixed line and data sectors, and I’ve spent the past 12 years working for one of the big carriers, looking after wholesale divisions and latterly small business and larger business divisions.
‘Obviously there’s a lot of breadth in small and medium enterprises, but the thing that interests me is what I deem the micro-SME – the really true small business, with fewer than 50 employees.
‘We were dressing up what was “prosumer” packaging as connectivity for small businesses. We were taking what we did really well for millions of consumers and saying “Isn’t this a great business proposition?”. And really the only differentiation we had in the proposition was “how many static IP addresses do you want free of charge?”.’ He added: ‘It’s very different if you’re a consumer and little Mary comes home from school and she can’t watch Peppa Pig compared with a business that has got a data connectivity line in its shop that runs its payment facilities.’
He explained: ‘For all UK carriers, bandwidth demand triggers from about 3pm through to around 12pm. There are things that impact it, like if Apple releases an updated operating system into the market and everybody comes home and Apple has said “please update”.
‘At Toople we wanted to be carrier agnostic. If you go to BT you only get sold BT, if you go to Vodafone you only get sold Vodafone.
‘We deployed software behind our website called Merlin. That interconnects with the biggest carriers in the UK – with Vodafone, BT Wholesale, BT Openreach and TalkTalk. And it makes a decision in an automated way on the customer’s location and the best network for them. Then it says to the carriers, we will only send you customers if you prioritise them over consumers. Network prioritisation is really important for those times.’
Meanwhile, a survey by OnePoll for Toople has found 62 per cent of SMEs do not know if they receive the right broadband speed and coverage for their business, and 54 per cent do not understand what telecoms services are best for them. The Big Six broadband providers – BT, Sky Broadband, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, PlusNet and EE – are used by 90 per cent of firms and consumers. A drop in broadband speed was noticed by 72 per cent.
Yesterday a report from MPs revealed 17 million mobile phone customers have poor reception at home or none at all. Grant Shapps MP said: ‘It is time to get tough with the industry’.
Last week, Vodafone was fined £4.6 million by regulator Ofcom for breaching consumer protection rules. John Whittle, cofounder of online mobile retailer Unshackled, said the fine had been ‘a long time coming’ and was ‘symptomatic of issues in an industry that doesn’t put customers at its heart’.