Will the real BT stand up?

Over the weekend I read three stories about BT which paint a confused view of just what it's future might be. On Saturday the Guardian reported that thanks to BT TV complaints have shoot up. The Yesterday's Sunday Times had two stories in the Business Section about the return of BT Mobile and a feature on NEW CEO Gavin Patterson's £2bn bet on sports TV.

If you read on paper you get the view that BT's retail strategy is in need of a major review. The customers are unhappy with the failings of not just it's TV product but also it's Broadband product. The only provider that gets more complaints for it's Broadband is EE.

Read the Sunday Times and all is good for BT it's about to get back in the Mobile Phone business after leaving in 2001 and BT TV has seen 3M on Virgin and Sky take the service. Then a full page feature on new CEO Gavin Paterson and his £2bn bet on sports TV is a bold gamble that aims to grow the business after a period of cost cutting. He will use a Quad Play offer to drive up incomes having bought some 4G spectrum and struct an MVNO deal with EE.

The problem is that Simon Duke in the Sunday Times does not seem to understand that BT has had MVNO agreements with O2 and Vodafone ever since it sold of it's mobile arm after over paying for 3G spectrum in 2000. He also does not seem to understand that since 2008 BT has failed to invest the money need to provide the long term upgrade in super-fast fibre to the curb rather than cabinet just as it failed to match European spending in ADSL deployment ten years previously.

When you start to understand that last week OFCOM reported that the UK has the lowest consumer prices for Mobile services in Europe you start to ask it's not just Duke that fails to understand the realities of a very competitive telecoms market but BT also.  For too long the Company thinks that one of its prime roles is to defend itself against the regulator rather than invest in it's Network so that it survives long term.  

We don't need no TV on our Phone

Today's Guardian reports that we are not a nation of Television addicts when it comes to watching on your mobile.

Now I have long said that Mobile TV is this years MMS, Gaming ...... in that this is an application that the user has not asked for but rather the Marketing Department thinks we will pay for. When you look at the Far East mobile TV works because the population density is such that choice is limited when you live in a tiny apartment and the nature of work means that watching TV when you are having lunch works. The content you have to remember is not broadcast but side loaded on the whole.

Now the Networks are not interested in side loaded content because it does away with the network and stops the user from using the phone to send texts etc.

Perhaps a few more reports that show Mobile TV is a dead donkey and the networks will drop the idea and focus on improving the voice quality. I have to report that too many calls have been dropped or of poor quality on my 3G handset this wonderful English summer. At the height of the flood watch I had to revert back to my land line because I needed to make a call and could not relied on Orange to maintain the call.

Some interesting data points

Technology Guardian has an opinion piece by Victor Keegan that highlights some interesting data about the Mobile Internet. He outlines that the reason that the mobile web is more important than the fixed one is that it comes with its own built in payment mechanism. It is this fact that means that the Crazy Frog made more money than all of iTunes in 2006.

The problem is that the cost of transit is a key element of the $31Bn revenues and just like the net did not take off until broadband and unlimited the lack of unlimited net access is holding back development. Whilst I agree that this may be true, I also contend just how many Mobile Users ask for a data package; if you get to see the internal numbers for some of the networks the fact that they have added millions of new accounts in the last year is not reflected in how many of those have taken a data account to go with it. I still contend that most people want a phone just to send texts and make calls. If it was a price issue then those in the mobile networks could fix it by opening the mobile web, know that unlikely the fixed operators they would still make money thanks to their control of the payments platform.

Today's Economist has a feature about the rise of the ebook on your mobile in Japan, the print edition shows a row of women reading the screens of their mobile phones. The market has sprung up over the last five years to the point that it is now worth $82m a year and is still growing fast. Whilst the use of Mobile Data in the Far East is important I have learnt that the fact that using your mobile to make a call on in public is not something that is seen as polite, a large number of the public commute for over three hours a day and that the housing situation means that denisity levels are close to a battery farm all mean that shaping a business on what happens in Japen or Korea is a very high risk.

Keith has what I consider to be the best comment on the populist nature of the EU war on Roaming Rip Offs. I guess as a Business User on a Contract the fact that most of my calls last over 2 minutes and that I travel alot mean that the EU think that I am using a service such as Awayphone!

Someone else that thinks Orange has lost its MoJo

Heading home on the tube today and I manage to read the G2 supplement to the Guardian. Charlie Brooker has decided that his new handset from Orange is just too much for him. His Samsung E900 is just too much. He finds the change in menus confusing, the features irritating and the making of phone call annoying. He tells us that he has the phone because he was sold the free handset from the now famous Orange Upgrade Centre that said that he got not just a free handset but also free texts at weekends for life!

My gripe is that as my daughters did well in the schools admission lottery I have two let them both have a mobile phone. In an effort to get some control over the whole process I opted for two pay as you go handsets from Orange. The girls are to get £10 per month credit billed to my contract with Orange. I went for purchase via my phone and so have had to deal with Orange Direct. The level of service that you get as a prepaid customer is somewhat different from that of someone who is an Orange Premier customer. I was told that the handset would be shipped Friday and would be with me on Monday. If it was a handset upgrade then we would have had the phones Saturday. So this lunchtime I called to see where are my handsets to be asked what made me expect that I would get them today it usually takes two to five working days. I asked if I had know that the service would be this slow then I would have gone into an Orange store and picked them up. Could I still do so I asked, yes but they could not refund the cost of the handsets until they were returned to the distribution centre. It was thus easier for me to just tell the girls that they have waited a year for me to get them a phone and another day was not going to kill them.

What makes me think that when I get the two phones the process of registering them and setting up Magic Numbers is going to be easy. The frustration level is rising to the point that I can feel the need to vent via email to a member of the Executive team so that he gets one of his employees to expedite.