Ofcom’s recent ‘separation’ stricture has ensured that BT Group’s annual results presentation to the city gave greater airtime to the leadership of its now semi-detached property, Openreach.
Investors need to understand past performance and assess the forward risks and opportunities. The bigger picture – mighty ships battling against headwinds – was roundly ridiculed as thin cover for self-induced blunders rather than unknowable forces of nature. Could that overall decline, investors might ask, be offset by Openreach’s discovery and ultrafast colonisation of new Gigabit lands?
Last week, the captain of BT’s Openreach gave his crew early warning of a new direction. But his ship’s crew comprises far more than loyal employees – it’s a complex weave of stakeholders including investors and wholesale customers (Communications Providers – the ‘CPs’) – so the occasion provided anxious risk-takers with opportunities to read the runes.
Openreach chief exec Clive Selley was reported as saying; “So it is my job to collaborate closely with all the other CPs to figure out at what pace we roll out the ultrafast platforms. And we are going to do that hand in glove with the CPs, because ultimately they are the ones that are going to have to compete and beat the alt-nets in the market place.”
Inevitably the tech-media headlines shouted ‘Fibre Rethink‘. But the espousal of an enhanced collaborative credo suggests more than relationship counseling. Was this a concern to nip in the bud any hint of a wholesale mutiny or jumping ship? Why so? It’s a reflection of finding a radically different market situation to that for which the CP crew had first been recruited. They signed up to flog phone-lines and ‘leased lines’. Now they need to shift to new services that need far greater reliability and capacity and have little in common with the old voice telephony. The CPs have laboured long with short-term fixes and unlikely performance claims. Now they are increasingly attracted to work with those alternative network pioneers and are held back only by the rate of pure fibre deployments. Meanwhile Openreach still holds to seeing those very different, vastly superior and ‘fit for future’ networks as direct competitors rather than contributors to the greater good.
Other (imaginary) voyages of discovery
Imagine if you will, dear readers, that this is the year 1500.
The good ship Openseas is sailing nervously towards the previously presumed precipitous edge of a flat world – and the crew are mightily troubled by the rumoured fate of earlier voyagers who did not return. On the bridge the captain anxiously scans the horizon but he and his crew are alone. Their resolve to push on can only come from an inner determination. These are complex and confusing seas with shifting currents and a need for confident navigation. With no hope of external assistance they must overcome fears or resign to their fate but they will earn (eventually) the accolade, ‘pioneer’.
And now, friends, imagine that we are in the year 1839.
In the latest episode Dickens’ Fagin is casting around for a way out of social storms on all sides to secure his survival. Desperately he considers the alternatives:
“This rotten life is not for me.
It’s getting far too hot for me.
Don’t want no one to rob for me.
But who will find a job for me,
There is no in between for me
But who will change the scene for me?
…I think I’d better think it out again!
Hey!”
There is, of course, no one to ‘change the scene’ – he alone must choose a new path. To survive, his enterprise must think again to find a new re-formed direction that rejects all previous convictions and missteps along the way. That resolve may be prove to be beyond his reach.
And so, back now to 2017.
Is it any wonder that Openreach is ‘Reviewing the Situation’? Is this the end of ‘the line’ or is this, beamed through pure fibre, a new, low energy, low maintenance, high performance, enlightenment that costs far less and shines far brighter for his enterprise and for the for the entire economy?
So, let’s wrap up this reflection with the answer to a light-bulb joke. It takes only one psychotherapist to change a light-bulb but that light-bulb must really want to change.
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Groupe Intellex 
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