Growth through transformation

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Mobility 
Mobility is about much more than mobile phones and text messages. In a convergent world, individuals and businesses want and need to communicate wherever they happen to be, using whatever devices – mobile and fixed-line phones, PCs, palmtops – they choose. True mobility is about connecting people to people, people to systems, businesses to businesses and machines to machines, any time, any place, any device.

The right stuff
BT has the right brand, channels and network capabilities to really deliver in the fast-growing mobility market.

What we’re aiming for is providing all our customers with a winning combination of the quality, reliability, cost advantages and capacity associated with fixed-line communications, AND the convenience, personalisation and independence associated with mobile communications. In other words, the best of both worlds.

During the 2005 financial year, in partnership with Vodafone, we launched BT Mobile as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) – a move that puts us well on the road to offering the world’s first fully converged, fixed/mobile service.

This really is a new way of doing a new kind of business.

And it can be a major growth area for us. In the 2005 financial year, revenue growth in the mobility market was 107%.

And we’ll shortly be launching Project Bluephone – a converged mobile service, enabling customers to use a single device that can switch seamlessly between fixed and mobile networks.

Mobility for businesses
We launched BT Mobile as an MVNO in the business market in November 2004, offering a wide range of flexible mobile services including mobile conferencing facilities.

We’re also a leading UK provider of wireless broadband (Wi-Fi).

BT Openzone, our public Wi-Fi service, gives users a high-speed wireless broadband connection at thousands of ‘hotspots’ from which they can access the internet, send and receive emails with attachments and connect to a corporate network. As at 31 March 2005 , our customers had access to more than 7,500 hotspots throughout the UK and more than 20,000 around the world.

We are convinced that a partnership strategy is essential for success in this market and we are working hard through the Fixed Mobile Convergence Alliance, which is developing open industry standards, and through the Wireless Broadband Alliance, which is driving the roaming arrangements that will help to make global mobility a reality.

Mobility for consumers
In January 2005, we launched the BT Mobile MVNO in the consumer market, with a package aimed at families, offering a range of benefits including up to five additional handsets, free short calls to a designated home number and a single consolidated mobile bill.