Broadband Britain: 'It's our country and we'll cry foul if we want to'

Earlier this week BT CEO Ben Verwaayen granted silicon.com a rare opportunity to grill him on the state of broadband Britain (see http://www.silicon.com/a55481 for more).

Our coverage of this meeting of minds created a great deal of interest and lively debate. Verwaayen told us that BT puts customers first - and some of you laughed. He told us that BT is a business, run for profit - and you said, 'Tell us about it, that's why we can't get broadband in the countryside.'

And the very idea that you should stop whingeing about not having broadband (see http://www.silicon.com/a55483 for more) really didn't go down at all well.

Here are a selection of your comments:

No - keep whinging
By Chalky White
BT is discriminating against rural Britain. It was prepared to take a business risk regarding broadband in urban areas, but is not prepared to take that risk with the very areas that would benefit most from broadband.

Oftel should force BT to provide the broadband service to all parts of Britain. It should not be subsidised. If BT claims to be a UK wide business, it should be forced to provide the service UK wide.

Would we have a telephone system?
By Ross Macadam
If the early telephone implementers or utility services took the same short sighted approach and had asked all potential service subscribers to declare an interest in purchasing a service contract before building delivery capabilities, would the country have mains water, electricity or a telephone service?

Business is about risk and reward, unfortunately what BT is saying is that it doesn't want to take a risk unless there is a guaranteed reward - what a pity someone hadn't performed a comparative analysis of what people might want (ie broadband services v 3G) before such a huge amount of money was wasted on the 3G licence debacle. What a pity that the CEO of BT shows such a lack of vision - in its absence how does he justify his (presumably massive) salary?

What a load of rubbish (Part One)
By Pete Sheppard
BT's new 'visionary' is no more than a puppet for shareholders. Broadband is the way forward, and take up will improve if it is more available (have BT not heard about word-of-mouth recommendations?)

What a load of rubbish (Part Two)
True, the poor take up of broadband is partly due to absence of content to drive it, but that hasn't stopped other European countries biting hands off. The simple fact is that BT thought it could invest minimally and then fleece what it thought were 'desperate' punters for a silly amount of money for far too long. At last the cost is coming to a vaguely realistic level. NEVER underestimate the public's ability to sniff value for money.

Blame Thatcher (Part One)
By Phil Thane
During the depression an old institution, the GPO, installed telephone lines to my village. No-one dreamed that more than two or three people would ever have private phones but it was seen as a valuable public service to be provided at the public expense. Once the network was popular and profitable some mad woman gave it away.

Can we have a new institution to install the next generation of unprofitable public service communications technology, and perhaps hang on to it this time?

Blame Thatcher (Part Two)
By Richard Woods
So BT has made it clear: As a result of privatisation it is NOT responsible for enabling improved communication services to their customer base unless it is profitable. Which part of its franchise covers this exactly? Or was the Thatcher privatisation bandwagon even more deaf to common sense than we thought?

It's time for someone to re-examine BT's right to exist - or do they also want a taxpayers' handout like Railtrack and British Energy - two other shining examples of privatisation of course...

Blame Thatcher (Part Three)
By Nick Ford
He said it in a nutshell: they're only out to make money. When it was the GPO it was a national institution and it should be again. It has a social responsibility. Nationalise it!

It's obvious he is getting the public to accept that BT won't be responsible for anywhere that doesn't turn a profit. That's privatisation as everybody wanted!

Blame lazy staff not Verwaayen
By Fiona Blair
The problem could be too many engineers and middle management don't want to learn new tricks. They have cashed in their employee shares in the boom and are prepared to draw their salaries and sit back doing things as slowly as they can despite the best efforts of Ben Verwaayen and his team.

Verwaayen should spend a couple of hours listening to calls and take action from the bottom up in his organisation!

Excuses, excuses...
By Charles St. Aubyn
How pathetic to hear Verwaayen wittering on about covering two thirds of the population. Does he really think BT is going to make money by offering broadband to run down parts of London, Birmingham and Manchester where the idea of actually having a PC at home is beyond the resources of many people?

I am not advocating that broadband should be for the 'well-off' only, but come on BT where is your market? DSL is hardly cheap. Throwing statistics like this at the problem doesn't achieve anything. If you are really interested in looking after shareholders then how about you get your many marketeers to examine where there is demand, rather than using guesswork. Surely less than 30 miles from London is considered within a sensible high demand area, but no, we are not even able to register!!

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