BT Group plc

And, you know, what's interesting from the operator standpoint is, It was a fairly large breadth.

Obviously, a lot of European operators, right? You had T-Mobile in the U.S., you had DT, you had Elisa, you had BT, Orange, and then also something from SoftBank.

And a lot of this was, you definitely saw a broad set of what these folks were doing.

Right, so T-Mobile ELISA was really talking about delivering these field trials of AI RAN.

And so I think showing how this works is particularly interesting.

You had Orange looking at distributed voice AI inference.

BT talking about actually using some of the models to inspect field infrastructures.

You saw the whole breadth here, which I think is interesting.

Maggie had privatized the telecoms industry.

So up until the early 80s, it was a monopoly by British Telecom, what BTM became.

and if you wanted to to a point where if you wanted some new telephone lines in your firm or you wanted to start a new business you had to wait three or six months before bt got around to doing it so everybody just bribed a bt engineer to do it literally it's like living in a communist country i'm not laughing to talk to people who were around at that time so we now even privatized it floated you know massive share offering to the public bt often often And we started a telecoms business, and we backed the marketing director of British Telecom, and we bought a small design engineering business, which had developed a very clever switch, PABX, telephone exchange for the commercial sector.

And we marketed that aggressively into the UK, and it was a pretty successful business.

We went public after five years.

A Conservative, Sir Julian Lewis, said as well as being prepared, it was important to have a reliable backup system.

Does he share my concern that both in the field of telephony and in the field of banking, backup systems don't seem to exist? In particular, was the government consulted before British Telecom decided not only to move on to an internet-based telephone system...

but actually to dismantle the copper wire system, which could have given us useful levels of resilience in an emergency.

I'm Sean Curran.

I was brought up in London, and now in New York, my little European brain explodes every time I see how much space and how big stuff is here in Texas.

I had an internship with British Telecom in London.

And so I was there for about three months, and it was fantastic.

But I had the same reaction when I came back to Texas.

It's shared with the phone line.

And it was all open reach, which is part of BT, what's British Telecommunications, what was the incumbent in the UK.

And people could essentially buy wholesale services using that last mile, so that bit to get in the house.

So it's troubleshooting those faults.

It could be the copper's broken outside somewhere.

And you'd have a bunch of diagnostic tools.

And you'd even need to raise it with BT.

You'd even need to talk the customer through what was going on.