Growth through transformation

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Broadband 
It’s easy to forget how fast the world can change. Blink and you might miss it. When, three years ago, we said that we would have five million broadband connections by the summer of 2006, no one thought we had a chance. But now that we’ve delivered those five million connections more than a year ahead of schedule, no one seems very surprised. After all, it’s been clear for some time that we were going to make it.

Broadband is a huge success story for BT, which is transforming itself from a narrowband to a broadband company at the same time as the UK is fast becoming a broadband nation.

In the past few years, we’ve brought broadband to more than 4,400 exchanges, connected to almost 97% of the UK ’s homes and businesses. That figure will reach 99.6% this summer, the highest availability in any of the G7 group of countries.

A few years ago, only the experts had any clear idea what broadband was all about. Today, it’s one of the first must-have products of the twenty-first century and one of the fastest growing consumer products of all time with a higher early take-up rate than TVs, video recorders or mobile phones.

And the momentum continues to build. It took us about a year to reach our first million broadband connections; the fifth million took just four months.

Since September 2004, we’ve been connecting a new customer to broadband every ten seconds, 24/7.

Pushing the boundaries
Now that broadband has become a genuinely mass market product, the nature of the broadband debate has changed.

The focus is moving away from availability and towards the ways in which broadband can transform our lives at work and at home.

For many people, broadband initially meant fast, always-on internet access and email – an end to the worldwide wait. But now, they’re beginning to realise that so much more is possible – music and video downloads, video emails, education services and so on.

Within a couple of years, every child in the UK will have the chance to learn via broadband and up to 18 million of us will be shopping online.

But as the demand for increasingly sophisticated broadband services grows, so must technology’s ability to cope with it. That’s why we’re continuing to push the boundaries of broadband technology.

We transformed our retail broadband offering by moving most of our broadband customers to a new super-fast standard speed of up to 2Mbit/s at no extra cost, beginning February 2005. Customers now have access to speeds up to four times faster than before.

And we’re not stopping there. We’ve been testing speeds of up to 8Mbit/s and plan to launch high-speed wholesale products later this year. And we’ve even been trialling something called ADSL2+ which may support speeds of more than 20Mbit/s.

Something for everyone
For customers at home we have a family of broadband packages designed to meet a wide range of needs.

Key packages include BT Broadband, which offers rapid, always-on internet access, and BT Yahoo! Broadband which gives users access to exciting content as well as a range of other benefits, including multiple email addresses, protection against junk email, parental controls to prevent children accessing unsuitable content and protection against computer viruses.

In July 2004, BT Communicator with Yahoo! Messenger became the latest addition to this family, enabling customers to manage all their home communications – phone calls, texts, emails and so on – on their PC.

And we’ll also use broadband to make new services, such as video on demand and interactive TV, available to customers.

In the broadband economy
Broadband also has a key role to play in the UK economy, enhancing competitiveness, driving up productivity, promoting growth. Analysts estimate that the UK economy as a whole could be boosted to the tune of £7.5 billion a year by 2007 as a result of productivity gains made possible by broadband.

And what’s true of national economies is true of local ones as well, many of which are keenly aware of the possibilities. In February 2005, for example, Northern Ireland became the first UK region outside London to have every one of its exchanges upgraded to broadband by BT. Just a month later – thanks to a partnership between BT and the regional development agency, One Northeast – all 181 exchanges in the region had been upgraded. And in April 2005, we won a contract with the Scottish Executive to bring broadband to the UK ’s remotest communities, by broadband-enabling 378 exchanges.

BT Business Broadband is the leading service provider for small and medium businesses in the UK , with over 340,000 customers as at 31 March 2005 . At the end of the 2005 financial year, we were connecting around 250 business customers to BT Business Broadband every day. This is excellent business, particularly since more than half of them also took value-added services from us such as the Internet Security Pack and Internet Business Pack. 

Broadband has the power to change the way businesses operate and the way they communicate with customers and employees. In November 2004, for example, we launched BT Business Broadband Voice, which enables smaller businesses to use broadband connections for voice calls and cut the costs associated with supporting multiple business lines.