I have finally given up on BT.
Not just personally, but professionally as well. My business is moving away from them, and after the last few weeks I genuinely cannot understand why anybody voluntarily stays with them unless inertia, exhaustion or fear of changing provider finally overwhelms the instinct for self-preservation.
The final straw was email.
Like many people of a certain age, I have had a BT email address for years. It became part of the architecture of life. Banks have it. Government departments have it. Mailing lists have it. Old friends have it. Businesses have it. Changing it is not like changing your Netflix password. It is more like moving house and discovering half your post is still being sent to the old address five years later.
Recently BT decided that accessing email through Apple Mail on my MacBook was apparently a luxury too far. After years of working perfectly normally, it abruptly stopped. The “solution” involved downloading BT’s own app, which worked intermittently on my iPhone and not at all on my laptop. Endless loops of passwords, verification codes, browser redirects and support pages followed. Every step designed less to solve a problem than to make me regret existing.
The experience felt oddly familiar. Not like dealing with a modern technology company, but like dealing with a utility monopoly from the 1970s. Bureaucratic. Defensive. Deeply uninterested in the customer experience. A company that behaves as though your dependence on its infrastructure is more important than your satisfaction with its service.
And I’m not the only one. BT are on course to lose 1m broadband customer this year. How many mail users they have lost
And that was the moment I realised something slightly uncomfortable.
We talk endlessly in Britain about failed privatised utilities. We complain about water companies pumping sewage into rivers, rail franchises collapsing into state management and energy firms vanishing every time wholesale prices rise. We demand renationalisation. Politicians nod gravely while promising “reform”.
But nobody really talks about BT in the same way.
Which is odd, because BT increasingly looks like exactly the kind of privatised utility monopoly people claim to despise.
The utility Britain pretends is not a utility
Part of the reason is psychological.
People still think of BT as a telecoms company. Something vaguely competitive and technological. A business operating in a dynamic market full of innovation and consumer choice.
But underneath the branding, a huge chunk of BT is really a national infrastructure utility.
Around half of BT’s profits now come from Openreach, the infrastructure arm which owns and manages the physical broadband network. The cables, ducts, exchanges and fibre network that much of modern Britain depends on. It is regulated, capital intensive, strategically essential and throws off relatively stable long-term returns. In other words, it behaves remarkably like a utility.
And like many privatised British utilities, BT has accumulated a debt pile large enough to make most normal companies faint. Around £20 billion in net debt, alongside enormous pension liabilities inherited from its days as a state monopoly.
Yet somehow this rarely produces the same political outrage directed at companies like Thames Water.
In fact, BT shares a surprising number of characteristics with the privatised utilities Britain increasingly claims to hate.
Huge debt burdens. High executive pay. Institutional complacency. Endless layers of management. Customer hostility. Legacy systems held together by improvisation and duct tape. A business culture shaped by decades of monopoly power.
Above all, BT shares the peculiar arrogance common to former monopolies: the sense that customers are not people to be delighted but administrative problems to be processed.
Anyone who has dealt with BT customer service will know exactly what I mean. The organisation often feels less like a company competing for your business and more like a ministry reluctantly issuing permits.
The important differences
Of course BT is not identical to the water companies.
That distinction matters.
Unlike Thames Water, BT has actually invested heavily in infrastructure. Openreach’s fibre rollout is real and substantial. Britain’s broadband network, while far from perfect, is improving. Customers can technically leave. Competition exists, even if much of it still depends on Openreach infrastructure underneath.
Nor is BT pumping raw sewage into rivers.
These differences are important because they expose the real issue.
The problem is not privatisation itself. Nor is it simply public versus private ownership. The problem is trying to combine two fundamentally different types of business inside the same corporate structure.
Openreach behaves like a utility. BT Retail increasingly behaves like a struggling commercial business operating in a brutally competitive market.
One half of the company is stable, infrastructure-heavy and quasi-monopolistic. The other half is losing customers at alarming speed while generating widespread consumer hostility.
At the moment, the utility side effectively props up the commercial side.
That arrangement increasingly makes little sense.
The case for breaking BT up
The traditional left-wing answer would be straightforward renationalisation. Bring the whole thing back into state ownership and recreate the old British Telecom.
I do not think that works.
The retail and consumer side of BT should absolutely have to survive in a competitive market. If customers are leaving in large numbers because service is poor, prices are high and the culture is dysfunctional, then the company should have to deal with the consequences.
But Openreach is different.
Openreach is already basically a utility in all but name. It owns nationally essential infrastructure. It depends on long-term investment cycles. It operates under heavy regulation. Much of the country has no meaningful alternative to its physical network.
So perhaps the logical answer is separation.
Bring Openreach back into some form of public ownership or mutual infrastructure model. Separate it entirely from the retail business. Let the infrastructure side operate like the national utility it already resembles, focused on long-term investment rather than shareholder extraction.
Then let the rest of BT sink or swim on its own merits.
Because at the moment Britain has ended up with the worst of both worlds: a quasi-monopoly utility culture hidden inside what is supposedly a competitive private company.
For forty years Britain has treated privatisation almost as a religious argument. But the truth is much messier than either side likes to admit.
We did not really privatise our utilities. We privatised the debt, the customer complaints and the political blame, while leaving the public just as dependent as ever on creaking national infrastructure run by organisations too large, too indebted and too insulated from failure to behave like normal businesses.
BT may simply be the clearest example of all.