Openreach boss denies BT selling stake in UK's national broadband plumber Openreach boss Clive Selley has roundly dismissed a report out last night that BT was "in talks" with buyers to flog a multibillion-pound stake in its pipe-laying arm to investors. In a memo to staff responding to the article in the FT, Selley wrote: Many of you will have seen the reports overnight about BT being in talks to …
BT could be preparing to make OpenRetch a totally separate company (As Sky, VM and Talk-Talk want) if OFCOM says jump.
Then the issue of ownership would have to be sorted. It might even need an act of parliament given the strategic nature/national security impact of the OpenRetch network.
Telephones aren't vital infrastructure! If the yanks are foolish enough to give us money for it then give it to them.
I do everything using the WiFi. I can't even remember the last time I used the telephone line for anything. The only reason I have the telephone is because my WiFi provider forces me to also get a telephone. When providers start selling WiFi without forcing us to also buy telephones OpenReach will dissappear!
It's a shame I can't work out if you're joking or ignorant. Maybe if you knew what Openreach does you'd be less likely to write posts like that. Unless you're with Virgin Media or possibly a private fibre company (although even they might end up on Openreach eventually) your broadband provider is likely to using Openreach lines to get the service to you.
You're confusing telephones with communication. Communication is vital infrastructure. It doesn't matter if you use a phone, a laptop, a PC or a tablet. It doesn't matter if you're using the phone link, WiFi, Internet or mobile data ; it's all communication.
And if you think phones communicate any differently than PCs these days, you need to wake up to the 3rd millennium. POTS is long dead, everything is TCP/IP these days.
BT is a publicly traded company. Who knows what percentage of the current shareholders are foreign individuals, companies, or sovereign wealth funds.
Its headquarters are in the UK, that's all.
BT and Openreach's operations are dominated by UK business and customers, so that's not likely to change.
It is (I think) the UK’s largest payer of corporate tax. If it were bought by an overseas outfit I’d imagine they’d try to engineer their income in such a way that they’d pay very little here. It’s mostly owned currently by pension funds- shareholding’s are a matter of public record.
From what I read the point is that BECAUSE they can no longer use Huawei kit to implement much of what they need to do BT/Openreach now have to spend millions of pounds of money they had no budgeted for.
The result of this is going to be a classic shooting oneself in the foot with the result that core infrastructure will be sold off to foreign companies (with the US having a finger in the pie) so that they can afford to upgrade and expand.
The ultimate incongruity will be if the Chinese end up buying a stake. This really is short sighted stupidity by Government at is best.
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