BT promises better broadband for customers across the country

Patterson said: “For the past five years, the United Kingdom has been the largest digital economy in the G20, by percentage of GDP”.

BT Group Plc, the United Kingdom phone company facing calls for a breakup from competitors, promised to expand the speed and reach of its network and hire new engineers to improve customer service ahead of the communications regulator’s decision about its future.

“We want to forge an ultrafast future for Britain and stand ready to help government deliver the broadband speeds necessary for every property to enjoy modern day internet services, such as high definition TV streaming and cloud computing. We’re willing to support the government to ensure homes and business in the most hard commercially accessible parts of the United Kingdom are connected”, he said.

Patterson said new technologies developed at BT’s Adastral Park research laboratories “should help boost slow speeds for many hard-to-reach premises”.

The BT chief said the United Kingdom would “go beyond government’s current 95 per cent target for fibre availability, thanks to “success dividend” clauses in contracts covering rollout co-funded by BT, Whitehall and local councils”. In a letter published in the Financial Times on Monday, the CEOs of Sky Plc, TalkTalk and Vodafone United Kingdom called for the Competition Markets Authority to join Ofcom’s review to “address the structural barriers to competition”.

The report adds that over 78% of premises had access to superfast broadband at the end of 2014 in the United Kingdom , compared to 77% in Germany, the next best-performing country. “Nobody is doing more than BT to ensure that the North East has world-class broadband communications”.

The announcements follow pressure from BT’s rivals and others for a radical shake-up of the broadband market.

The disclosure was made during a long-winded announcement reaffirming the telco’s commitment to extending faster Internet services to harder-to-reach areas of the United Kingdom using various technologies including satellite, and a suggestion that the incumbent’s abortive fibre-on-demand (FoD) service may come back from the dead.

The chief executive of the Openreach division, Joe Garner, Tuesday said there was more to do on service, and set out an ambition to exceed Ofcom’s 2017 minimum standards for delivering new connections on time by 6%.

A “View My Engineer” smartphone app, which goes live in a few weeks, will allow customers to track exactly what is happening with their broadband installation.

Additionally, Garner highlighted the issue that customers often can not directly deal with Openreach, only their retail broadband provider, said he is open to Openreach dealing directly with end-customers, subject to consultation with Ofcom and telecom providers.

Paolo Pescatore, director, multiplay and video at CCS Insight said BT’s commitments today mark “the latest tussle between BT and its rivals” in light BT’s planned acquisition of mobile operator EE. However, this is unlikely to satisfy its rivals as they will still call for full separation, lower prices and greater access to BT’s network.