French telco tycoon Patrick Drahi ups Altice UK's stake in BT to 18%, says he is not planning a takeover... at least not yet Billionaire telco tycoon Patrick Drahi has upped his stake in BT to 18 per cent but says he is not intending – at least not yet – to launch a full-blown bid to buy the business, a move the UK government warned it may thwart anyway. In June, Drahi's Altice UK wolfed down a 12.1 per cent stake in BT for £2bn, with the exec …
"The government is committed to levelling up the country through digital infrastructure, and will not hesitate to act if required to protect our critical national telecoms infrastructure."
BT is barely beyond the telegraph level of hardware. It needs a lot of investment and modernization to stay competitive.
Patrick should invest in a direct BT competitor and leave full government control over the sinking ship in UK Gov hands.
He doesn't need to do a take over. It's a long term investment. BT has a fortune of copper in its network that is not reflected in its share price. It can't get to it because it's in use and the cost of extracting just the unused bits is too high. As the planned roll out of fiber for areas completes they will be able to pull out vast amounts of copper with little risk of service interruptions. Copper recovery will become a big money spinner. The copper free network whilst expensive to install will be much more reliable and so less costly to maintain.
Not so good when the storm also takes out the only available cell tower.
Or as happened during Storm Desmond, the power outage is so prolonged (4 days in our case) the battery backup on the tower died and generators ran out of fuel.
We were forced to drive 10 miles to Morecambe and use the feeble signal coming across the bay from Grange to phone family to tell them we were safe.
If they rely on DECT phones then the phone will fail. That's why it pays to have a POTS phone in the circuit. If they have, then all they have to do is pick up the handset & they'll hear the dial-tone. Using a mobile in an extended power cut - assuming the base stations are working - is likely to mean starting the car to recharge it.
.......... from the huge political embarrassment for the Tories of being taken over by a Frenchman.
I mean, it was never a problem when that critical national infrastructure was our water or railways, so I can only conclude that all the blather about "Global Britain being open for business" comes with rather non-free-market conditions attached such as "subject to non-generation of hostile xenophobic tabloid newspaper headlines", especially when the government is going through, shall we say, a bit of a rough patch.
This is what happens when you wave the nationalist flag too vigorously, whilst simultaneously planting a "For Sale" sign on all the stuff that's still worth something.
It's only the last mile stuff from Openreach that the UK cares about, surely. Nothing else of BT is really worth a damn anymore.
Let him have the boat anchor that is the rest of BT but force them to sell off Openreach (which isn't great either but it's a bit of a monopoly).
Patrick Drahi and Altice are the worlds worst when involved in internet and telco. He will strip all knowledgeable tech support and all customer service leaving a hollowed out shell of a company that provides pitiful service to customers (including business customers) while sweeping the profits from the company. We know him well in the states, where he took over the customer-centric internet provider Suddenlink and ran it into the ground. If you value BT, run, don't walk, run.
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