BT has raised its fiber optic rollout targets and said EE was about to launch 5G "imminently" in 16 UK cities. So far, Openreach has connected 1.2 million local people with FTTP (fiber to the premise) technology, with the goal of reaching three million by 2020 and 10 million by the end of the year. Here in the middle of the next decade. At the current rate of implementation, approximately 20,000 properties are being added each week. It now plans to cover four million by 2021 and 15 million by mid-2020, if there is a suitable investment and regulatory climate.
BT fiber
The UK's largest telecommunications company made the announcement in its annual financial results, which show a 1% drop in posted turnover to €23.430bn. Growth in BT's consumer businesses was offset by continued difficulties in its global and services businesses, but pre-tax profit rose 2% to €2,666m. "Although we are really well positioned in a very competitive and challenging UK market, we still have a lot of work to do to ensure our success and deliver sustainable long-term value to our shareholders," said Philip Jansen, Chief Executive Officer of Results BT since joining the company in early 2019. "We need to invest to improve our customer proposition and competitiveness. We need to invest to stay ahead of our fixed, mobile and core networks, and reorganize our business to ensure that we use the latest systems and technologies to improve our efficiency and be more agile." The expansion of the company's fiber optic goals comes at a time when many more companies are investing in fiber optics and a number of more infrastructure players small have recently been bought by private equity firms. . This raised fears that BT would be left behind in consumer and wholesale markets, including mobile backhaul markets. The vast majority of Openreach's high-speed network uses FTTC (Fiber to the Cabinet) technology. The company plans to use a combination of G.Fast (which speeds up copper connections) and FTTP to upgrade its network. BT was supposed to cut its dividend for the first time since 2009 to fund infrastructure expansion, a decision some shareholders would have accepted if long-term gains could be demonstrated, but that is not the case. It does not occur. "For 2018/19, the board of directors decided to keep the full-year dividend at 15.4p per share, unchanged," Jansen added. "The Board also plans to keep the dividend unchanged from the current year, given our earnings and cash flow outlook."