Friday, May 19, 2006

De-Fusion?

BT's results yesterday seemed to please a lot of people, and there were indeed some positive things (residential ARPU increase, margin improvement at Retail, increase in share of DSL net adds, etc.), along with some negatives (a sharp increase in residential line loss to 10.8% annualized, acceleration in wholesale line rental and CPS net additions). However, one thing I was quizzical about was the Fusion numbers. Back in early February, when the company reported Q3 results, it said that as of the week ending 3rd February, Fusion was generating over 2,000 connections per week, and had over 13,000 customers. Yesterday's release contained the sentence "BT Fusion has now attracted over 30,000 connections since the launch." I confirmed with the company that the word "now" refers to the current total, not the total at the end of the quarter to 31st March. This implies that the run-rate for new connections is now in the 1,100 - 1,200 per week range, rather than the 2,000 cited earlier. What's going wrong?

UPDATE: Last year I tried to foresee what some challenges could be here and here, and predictably a number of mega-uber value readers have chimed in with their own choice views, which include:

"It seems to me that they have made the pain (new handset - no choice, new AP, tying myself into 3 BT subscriptions - two of which are uncompetitive etc.) not worth the meagre gain (mobile-to-fixed arbitrage for a few specific outbound call types)."

and

"How about some of the worst, dreariest newspaper adverts since GUM's Autumn sale, Moscow 1963?"

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