BT’s networks boss fleshes out thinking behind EE’s consumer pivot

Network X kicked off in Paris this morning, and the first set of keynote sessions yielded some detail from BT about its recent repositioning of EE.

Howard Watson, Chief Networks and Security Officer at BT Group (pictured left), offered up some of the reasoning and ambitions behind its recently announced strategy to make EE more than just a telco during a fireside chat at conference.

The announcement last week saw the introduction of EE ID, pitched as the gateway to a portfolio of services, some of which are outside the usual remits of what you might expect from an operator such as consumer electronics, insurance and home security.

Speaking to Dario Talmesio, Research Director, Service Provider Strategy & Regulation at Omdia (pictured right), Watson said that in the future the access network will no longer be the bottleneck, thanks to the fibre rollout and 5G. “We’re doing the replumbing phase at the moment… how do we take that basic connectivity and build more of a techco offering?”

Watson explained that ‘customers love connectivity, but don’t want to pay more for it,’ and framed the problem for operators as working out how to take that base service and move into other areas.

“We want to create a reason for customers to interact with us daily,” he added, and pointed out that “you can now become an EE customer without connectivity.”

When asked on a scale of 1 – 10 to rate the progress of the ‘telco-to-techco’ concept, Watson eventually offered up a 7, but added a note of caution. “We have to do it really carefully, make it evolution not crazy adjacencies away from what a telco is capable of doing,” he said.

Talmesio’s own presentation touched on some similar themes – asking if we, as an industry, should be even be limiting our discussion to ‘telecoms’.

Echoing another point made by Watson, he highlighted that ‘the amount of connectivity we need and use keeps growing at a very strong pace.’ 5.8 million petabytes of data will be used in 2024 he claimed, but said the price per unit of data is shrinking.

There has been talk of telcos evolving into ‘techcos’ for years now, driven largely by the fact that while connectivity as a product is more abundant and in more demand than ever, the operators providing it are not necessarily seeing a way to charge more for it.

There are still a lot of details to be fleshed out from BT/EE’s approach to solving this conundrum – how well they manage to pull it off will no doubt be watched keenly by the rest of the operator ecosystem.

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