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Gavin Patterson predicts Ofcom strategic review announcement will make Thursday ‘an exciting day’, but the wider industry could be disappointed.
"It is likely to be around 2020," when the U.K. gets its first 5G network, BT chief executive Gavin Patterson told attendees at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday.
The U.K. incumbent has made a recent return to the world of the mobile network operator, having closed its acquisition of EE a month ago.
But throughout the 15 years since the spin-off of former mobile arm O2, mobility remained on the agenda at BT, Patterson said, which will help the company as the market moves towards the fifth generation of mobile technology.
"We did have a mobile division in the ’90s…[and] it’s never gone away completely," Patterson said. "We’ve been investing in wireless R&D for a while."
As such, the telco says it – and the U.K. – will be at the forefront of 5G development, "when the standards harden."
In the meantime, BT faces a sizeable challenge on the fixed-line side, with competitors calling for the full separation of its Openreach access arm, an issue that is currently being examined by regulator Ofcom as part of its latest market review.
Ofcom is due to publish its findings on Thursday, which looks set to be "a very exciting day," Patterson said.
Possibly. Total Telecom has heard on the grapevine that the regulator may well defer its decision on Openreach to a later date, so we might have to wait for anything definitive on that score.
Nonetheless, Patterson took the opportunity to once again share BT’s view that retaining Openreach within the group is "the right way forward," insisting that the past decade of investment in the business would not have happened had it been an independent entity.
"The investment cycles are so long," he said. When Openreach began its superfast broadband investments in 2009, the payback time was 20 years on the infrastructure alone.
"It simply wouldn’t have got off the ground," without the longer-term view that BT was able to take as a group, Patterson said. "Who was investing in 20-year paybacks with no customers in 2009?" he asked.
