BT will shed as many as 55,000 workers by 2030
cnn.com
cnn.com
Obviously everyone is focussing on the AI part.
EDIT: Sorry scratch that. I've confused the URL. I didn't see this is a CNN article. This one https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65631168 from bbc is much better (which I had read earlier). It shows the breakdown of where the jobs lost come from.
Broadly right, but your tense is wrong. Openreach's[1] FTTP rollout program extends to the end of December 2026. Realistically, it may be delayed, because the scale is rather huge.
[1] A subsidiary of BT who own the infrastructure, for competition grounds
Might not be 1000 up but certainly seems like it compared to what we had before!
Like usual the UK have already fitted substandard infrastructure.
The BT "FTTP" network is in fact shared fibre with up to 63 of your neighbours. It's based on old GPON technology.
This is why you may get 1Gb/s down but you will be limited to approximately 110Mb/s up.
The reason being that your downstream is broadcasted to all terminals, but AES encrypted (so your traffic is also sent to your neighbours) but the upstream traffic is sent using time division, so you get 1/64th of a unit to upload.
Then everyone is over provisioned, and over sold, so they give you a number that is higher than 1/64 because of the assumption that you and your neighbours won't all trying to use your maximum bandwidth at once.
Compare this to HyperOptic, or CityFibre who will plumb a slither of glass from your home, directly to the ISP. You get a full fat ethernet connection straight to the internet, 1Gb/s down, 1Gb/s up. BT could have done this too, but instead we get ADSL version of fibre.
Simply, Openreach probably have mediocre upload speeds on FTTP, so they can protect their leased line profit margins.
CityFibre use GPON, the exact same technology as Openreach. Yes, CityFibre offer a nice symmetric service on top of that, because real world contention is usually much lower than the theoretical maximum. It's also worth noting CityFibre are starting to upgrade to XGS-PON.
The "download" direction is sent to you and all your neighbours and only you can access the information as it is AES encrypted to your terminal (CPE, etc.). So you could get 2.4Gbps down, as long as your neighbours are not using it.
1.2Gbps "upload" direction is time shared, so you will never get the full 1.2Gpbs unless you have literally zero neighbours / other terminals on the optical bundle.
Again, CityFibre is not Point to Point fibre. They offer 1Gbps upload on GPON, contended at 1:32. From the horse's mouth: https://cdn.cityfibre.com/Partner-page/Downloads/CF-FTTH-Loc...
Even Openreach have a 220Mbit/s upload tier, but it costs more than twice as much so nobody offers it for home users. https://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/pricing/loadP...
If I needed to do a layoff now I’d just say “AI LLM Chatbot!!” woo-woo as cover.
The last good thing about IBM that I remember is the Thinkpad, but Lenovo's made them for longer than IBM did at this point.
Besides, the full 55k are about all automation, restructuring and digitisation efforts. Doesn't sound entirely unreasonable.
They probably are also looking to justify investment and say that they are investing into making the business more profitable for the next 7 years, so don't expect too much profit until after this investment is done.
"Jansen also said that around 10,000 fewer people would be needed to service and repair digital networks, which “go wrong less often” and can be fixed more easily than older networks."
That feels optimistic. Modernization does help with that sort of thing in some ways. But it also often adds complexity, higher dependency counts, etc.
The complexity is inside opaque boxes that BT deploys though. Rather than fixing things like they did in the past, sitting at the end of a street patching cables in a roadside cabinet, BT's engineers of the future will just unclip a box that's returning an error code and plug in a new one. Or someone in a NOC will reset it from 300 miles away. Maybe some AI will do that. Or a cron job. With fibre networks once the cabinet is installed and plugged into the network there's very little physical work to do. That's what engineers do now - manually splicing and connecting copper wire. That's the work that's going away.
To say it’s all based on copper cables, it was pretty impressive.
So you don't need phone operators to wait for calls about interrupted service, the software will just detect some unreachable part of the network and dispatch a team to investigate.
But I'm with you in the sense that new technology that does more than what they replaced will absolutely be added and need fresh workforces.
Sure, but nobody will remember someone said that seven years before. They might be hiring by that point, too.
A copper line isn't a continuous thing from the exchange to the customer. It's made of a number of sections that are joined together.
Now someone who once worked for a large British telecoms company once told me that they'd done some modelling, maybe using something like system dynamics if I was guessing, to gauge the effect of work on the network.
Any interaction with the equipment, whether to set up lines for a customer or even fix faults leads to more faults. So it ends up being more profitable to just leave equipment in place than to reuse it.
Based on that I would say that having all the pairs terminating at the cab instead of the exchange and using remotely configurable equipment would be a greater improvement again.
Just guessing you understand, I have no inside knowledge. ;)
The number of RFOs I see which report outages due to either fibre disturbances in an exchange or is phenomenal. I don't really have any idea how that compares with copper, but my home DSL runs over copper to the exchange and doesn't go down anywhere near as much.
What they mean is that consumers will be stuck with slow internet connections. As a result of customers switching to other providers they’ll have less equipment breaking down. Since you know it’s no longer in use.
it's going to be more reliable even if they completely screw everything up
What kind of culture and employee morale do they expect to have now that they've announced this?
Based on the last few lines of the article I think this CEO is trying to hype up a company that is facing serious struggles and decline of their core business:
> BT said revenue fell 1% to £20.7 billion ($25.8 billion) for the year to March, with growth in Openreach, its fibre broadband network, “more than offset” by declines in other businesses. Its adjusted earnings rose 5% to £7.9 billion ($9.8 billion).
> Shares in the company tumbled 8% in London, as higher expenditure leading to a drop in free cash flow disappointed investors.
This other quote is hilarious to me as well:
> “Our chatbot Amy deals with lots of customer queries already”
Any time you see a company that has a chatbot with a friendly human name you know it’s going to be a completely useless hunk of garbage. I am highly skeptical that “Amy” does anything besides delaying customers from talking to the human who can actually fix their problem (or just throwing them into a frustration loop that leads them toward canceling their service).
Then when the project fails to deliver, the sales pipeline dries up, projects stop getting done, etc they'll announce a hiring spree with great fanfare. Look at me, I'm a great CEO and leader! I'm going to re-hire the X positions we laid off or eliminated over the past 5 years under my prior leadership to solve the problems I created!
In the UK BT is a captive utility so shuffling the deck chairs is as good as doing real work I guess.
I haven’t dealt with them in recent years but based on previous dealings, I would put BT firmly in that category.
Their checkout flow can break. In some browsers it'll get stuck in an infinite redirect loop. If you're using edge you'll get redirected to a page that shows the ~10 year old BT Infinity branding, with a totally different style, packages, and prices.
Their chat bot is of the kind that decides whether or not you're allowed to speak to a human based on what it thinks your question is.
Sigh... it's depressing just reading this... you have my sympathy! :)
Im quite sure the chat bot is an annoying veneer over the help pages, and a hindrance to actually speaking to a human, because youve already checked the help pages and need to talk to a human to sort the problem.
the games industry moved from guess the verb to point and click adventure games over 30 years ago. why is customer service going the other way?
What strikes me as odd is they're viewing 'modernisation' efforts as one-time activities. Come 2030 are they saying they won't need to invest in their network as much or upgrade things? I think that's what they are saying, and I don't think they're going to be right.
But BT cheaped out and put down GPON. Maybe in 50 years time the average household will need more than 100Mb/s upload.
> Jansen also said that around 10,000 fewer people would be needed to service and repair digital networks
I believe this is what C. Doctorow would describe as “enshittening” customer support operations.
It doesn’t require AI or any other magic, just a juicy performance-based incentive and a big parachute. The next CEO will focus on “improving the customer experience”.
Generative AI and stuff like that will be much easier to judge the success or failure of. If we are ripping our hair out when contacting customer support 15 years from now (roughly the amount of time Bitcoin has existed), generative AI (I assume that's what you're talking about) for the purposes of customer support is a failure. Beyond that, sophisticated generative AI is the digital equivalent of discovering nuclear fission: it destroys online human discourse and pollutes the areas it infects with artificial garbage (fallout). I know I'm not the only one who's sick of seeing DALL-E stuff on Instagram and DeviantArt, and seeing stuff obviously written by LLMs in internet comment sections.