The announcement by the Post Office:

We have made the decision to leave the telecoms market and have sold our Post Office Broadband and Home Phone service to Shell Energy Broadband.

On 1 October 1981, Post Office Telecommunications officially became British Telecommunications a separate corporation. Post Office Ltd, began offering broadband service to customers in 2009 built atop TalkTalk’s network. in 2012 they dropped BT as the services provider for its home phone and broadband services in preference of other providers.

BT’s Openreach ultrafast network offer speeds of between 100Mbps and 500Mbps but most broadband providers use this network, such as TalkTalk and Plusnet, and have been able to provide cheaper end services. This means BT has to decided whether to have it’s cake and eat all of it.

In this scenario BT, who are responsible for the maintenance of the copper and fibre infrastructure, find it increasingly difficult to manage to stay in the infrastructure and provision industries, rather like it’s predecessor the Post Office which eventually had to split with telecoms. In 2022, Plusnet launched its first full fibre broadband deals, again pushing the bar just outside of BT’s reach.

In the end, the 1980s privatisation of the telecoms industry was a naturally evolving business model. Today as technology gets ever more present, with fibre services now reaching 95% of the UK population, it’s obvious that progress never stops and BT who are ending up with less slices of the cake should continue to focus on not losing the telecoms infrastructure market by holding on to existing ancillary revenue such as phone and broadband services when all of these are riding on the underlying infrastructure which is what they should be concentrating on to lower overall prices.

In March 2016 the Evening Standard reported that BT had been ordered to install lines for business more quickly.

It came in the wake of a complaint from the Criterion Theatre’s new owners the Milan-based Savini restaurant group, which the Evening Standard had also reported earlier in March.

Savini restaurants feature traditional Italian cuisine with a lively social bar culture. The Savini brand has been trading since 1867 and the opening of the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilli Circus was to be the group’s first venture outside of Italy and a high profile event.

Yet, Savini Restaurants have experienced a wall of incompetence from BT Business and it makes one wonder why on earth they simply didn’t dump them for a different provider.

The Savini Group made literally hundreds of enquiries with BT Business and remained four months later without phone or internet services.

Since taking over the property in November 2015, the Group have tried to arrange a launch opening PR event and have paid hundreds of pounds for BT technicians to visit. However it took two months for the first visit to happen and a further two months for the last visit on 4 March.

Savini at Criterion have been severely affected by the lack of telecoms provision and it’s fair to call it a fiasco and a disgrace.

BT stated: “We apologise for the delay in providing service to Savini at Criterion restaurant. We’re trying to provide them with phone and broadband as quickly as possible.”

Okay BT spokesperson, we just don’t believe you! ‘As quickly as possible’, really!

Ofcom, the telecoms watchdog stated that installation times have lengthened and called it ‘unacceptable.’ However like all organisations that simply use the word ‘unacceptable’ it is in the wake of the knowledge that it has happened and already been accepted.

Ofcom instructed BT to cut installation times for leased lines from 48 days to 46 days. Wow thanks Ofcom, that will really help to sort things out. In the meantime the ‘unacceptable’ service will just have to be accepted.