BT's national broadband outage sits badly with its corporate arrogance
- Summary:
- The UK had a major BT-caused broadband failure earlier in the week, but CEO Gavin Patterson's worldview is simple - everything's working just fine and dandy, even if critical MPs don't really understand.
Earlier in the week BT broadband across the UK ground to a halt. The collapse of the network as far afield as London, Glasgow, Birmingham and Sheffield caused complete service outages or major slowdowns.
The latter would something that those of us who remain digitally disenfranchised by BT from superfast broadband would have struggled to notice I suspect, but hundreds of thousands of people up and down the UK did.
In this day and age of course, the first thought was of a Denial of Service attack on the national infrastructure, but in the event it was all down to one router failing, something it took BT over 4.5 hours to work out.
But the failure did demonstrate yet again the madness of one company being responsible for such a significant single point of failure that such large chunks of the country were knocked offline by one incident.
Of course BT made the usual placatory token apologies for the outage, but the timing of the incident was splendid, coming as it did after some of the most self-satisfied comments I've ever heard from BT CEO Gavin Patterson about how well his firm is doing and how awful it is that anyone’s got a bad word to say about it.
On a high from the closure of the takeover of mobile operator EE, Patterson used an analyst call following BT’s quarterly results announcement to discuss the ongoing relationship between BT and its Openreach subsidiary.
While there have been calls from all sides for a termination of this toxic coupling, Patterson sees nothing but good things about it:
Over the past 10 years, Openreach has invested more than £10 billion into its networks which has enabled one of the fastest fibre roll out anywhere with superfast availability now at 90%. We're investing to match customers growing demand. Data usage is increasing at a rate of 40% per Openreach fibre line, while on Christmas day BT Consumer saw a 95% increase in data traffic. To help meet that growing demand we have been utilizing our research campus near Ipswich to develop new services that customers want, and to find ways of doing things more efficiently.
Our investments in R&D meant we could double our fibre speeds a few years ago from 40 mg to 80 mg. These investments have contributed to UK broadband speeds now being roughly 20 times what they were 10 years ago.
Whether you look at the reach of the technology, the speed of the connectivity or the demand for our product the marketplace has been transformed by the progressed Openreach has made all underpinned by their principle of equivalent and much of this would not have been achieved today had Openreach been structurally separate from the rest of the BT.
It’s really difficult to know where to begin with such complacent and smug cant, but Patterson ploughs on:
Without doubt, we have a model that works.
Openreach has supported the strength and diversity of our competition, which has increased immeasurably since 2006 and today underpins one of the most vibrant and competitive markets in the world.
We put the UK at the front of the pack of major European countries for digital communications and that holds true whether you look at competition or coverage, speed or take up or simply price which has made the UK a more connected place to live and a better place to do business.
Looking down from Mount Olympus
So, what about that damning report that came out from the British Infrastructure Group last month, backed by 121 cross-party MPs, which found appalling slow broadband throughout the UK, missed targets and deadline and called for the urgent break-up of the BT and Openreach?
Was this some other Openreach than the one Patterson views through his rose-tinted spectacles? His response is frankly breathtaking:
It's not a very well written report and there are number of things that are quite patently wrong in there. And it gives no credit at all to any of the progress we've made in the UK over the last five years and indeed any of the vision that we've set out for the next 10 years.
I thought it was a very biased and inaccurate report. I was pleased to see the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) came out strongly on our side. It wasn't hugely quoted, but it is there very clearly and in terms of the press release that they came out on the Friday that the report came out supporting the work that we and another have been doing in terms of building digital Britain.
Well of course DCMS backed BT! All governments departments end up as lobbyists and apologists for the industries they are supposed to be managing. If they don’t, then they have to take a share of the blame for failures. Just look at the changing goalposts around the Broadband Voucher scheme that were moved around in order to make that an oversubscribed success rather than an undersubscribed failure.
But there’s worse to come. Most companies would be concerned at 121 MPs from all across the political spectrum being ready to put their names to a document attacking you at a time when there are already inquiries underway into your conduct and performance. Not so BT, whose corporate arrogance enables the CEO to come up with:
In terms of the number of MPs that signed it, what we don't know is exactly what they signed to be perfectly honest. I don't know how many of them really understood what they were asking for and guess we will never know.
So there you have it. Those naughty national legislators just didn’t understand what they were doing when they put pen to paper. Silly old MPs. If only they'd asked BT for the correct worldview.
My take
I don't know how many of them really understood what they were asking for.
A quite appalling attitude from the BT CEO and I hope Patterson is hauled over the coals about such remarks by the Public Accounts Committee ASAP.
Meanwhile my own attempts to get a straight answer from BT about why it won’t deliver super-fast broadband to the city center of Brighton continues to plumb Kafka-esque levels of hell. Read more here.