EU Communicate Newsletter – December 2014
BT European Affairs Newsletter • December 2014 • www.bt.com/europeanaffairs
❱ EU Digital Single Market
The Digital Single Market initiative is an
opportunity to create a consistent and
coordinated approach to several different
areas of EU policy-making.
During 2014 the pace of change in
communications has continued to
accelerate, changing how we work,
how we bank, how we shop and
how we think, bringing new ways of
delivering healthcare and education,
reshaping how governments operate,
helping to create new businesses, and
driving social mobility. BT is right at
the heart of this. Our purpose is to
use the power of communications to
make a better world. In this edition of
EU Communicate we share our policy
views on the Digital Single Market,
Net Neutrality and Cyber security,
and explain how we have enhanced
our service platform for hearing and
speech-impaired people as well as
emergency services. We take a look
at the four new customer innovation
showcases we have opened across
Europe, including Brussels. We
wish all our readers a happy and
successful 2015.
Adrian Whitchurch
VP European Affairs
We believe the policy approach should
support growth in the communications
sector and the broader EU economy,
boost innovation and creativity and
maintain global competitiveness.
The principles underlying EU telecoms
regulation and EU competition law are
basically sound. However, the challenges
of consolidation, convergence and
of cross-border business service
provision, require adjustments to the
E- Communications Framework to deliver
a more aligned, consistent regulatory
treatment of converging markets
and sectors.
Fibre deployment underpins the Digital
Single Market ,and is best served by
a policy framework which maintains
the pro-competitive and technologyneutral principles of the EU Framework,
and the approach laid out in the EC
Recommendation. An emphasis on
local access based on active fibre
access products helps drive vibrant
retail competition which in turn
encourages take-up.
Convergence between telecoms
and media gives rise to a similar need
for policy consistency. Asymmetries
between telecoms operators and PayTV
providers are distorting the market as
bundling becomes ever more important,
and content the most compelling element
for consumers. By extending the access
principles of the E-Communications
Framework to content bottlenecks, the EU
can level the playing field across sectors,
achieve a better deal for consumers and
help stimulate fibre demand.
Cross-border service provision to
businesses across the EU should be a key
focus of the Single Market. Regulatory
inconsistency and non-availability of
key wholesale access inputs mean large
business customers are still missing out
on the full productivity benefits of ICT.
An effective wholesale access to business
connectivity products (leased lines and
Ethernet) is the solution for achieving
pan-EU competition.
Global dimension. The principles of
an open competitive Internal Market
should be extended to third countries,
pursuing reciprocal market opening and
competition in access in markets such as
the US via TTIP. Open trans-border data
flows are core to trade also.
IPR/Copyright reform policy needs
to strike the right between enabling
cross-border access, and respecting the
principles of territoriality, on which the
strength of Europe’s creative industry
is based.
❱ Open internet and net neutrality
❱ Security
BT is committed to an open internet, providing the benefits
of full consumer choice and commercial innovation. We
believe anti-competitive blocking should be prevented,
and reasonable traffic management practices allowed,
balanced by full transparency. We are continuingly
upgrading our network so that internet access service is
improving in parallel to the introduction of innovative
new services – these are mutually reinforcing.
The EU has a number of strong instruments on the table on
cyber security: the future EC NIS directive, the EC cyber security
strategy, the EC NIS platform and EC research programmes.
A good balance between these instruments and a clear
direction shared by all EU Member States and interested
parties is now needed.
Unlike in the United States, the European internet access
market is a strongly competitive one, which means content
providers’ and consumers’ ability to choose acts as a significant
constraint on access providers without the need for regulation.
The priority now should be to find a workable balance which
leaves National authorities greater flexibility to maintain
self-regulatory mechanisms and to avoid overly
prescriptive detail.
The EC NIS directive needs to be clear, focused and manageable.
Protection of the critical sectors’ services seems a good common
basis that sets a clear direction. Internet enabling services (IES)
should not be included in the scope of the EC NIS directive, for
a number of reasons.
Many IES are not critical and are covered by EC data protection,
privacy or specific legislation. Cloud and EIS will be covered if
used by critical sectors. Essential telecom services are regulated
by the 2009 EC Framework. In other areas security is governed
by commercial contracts. It is the ICT sector’s and client’s
responsibility to protect their services. These relationships are
working and fundamental in a commercial market.
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BT European Affairs Newsletter • December 2014 • www.bt.com/europeanaffairs
❱ BT’s new service for hearing and speech-impaired people
BT is making it easier for people with
hearing and speech impairment to make
phone calls.
It follows the launch of BT’s next generation
text (NGT) service which enables people
who need to use text to communicate with
others, either directly or through a relay
assistant.
The relay assistant acts as an intermediary
to convert speech to text and vice versa, for
the two people in conversation.
NGT replaces BT’s existing text relay service
which has been operating for more than
20 years.
❱ BT partners charity to
help online abuse victims
BT is partnering with a children’s charity to
help victims of online sexual abuse.
T​ he partnership with the Marie Collins
Foundation (MCF), the only children’s
charity in the UK devoted to helping
children and their families who have
suffered online sexual abuse and
exploitation, will pilot a new programme
that will eventually train all frontline
workers to help children harmed in this way.
It gives deaf, hearing-impaired and speechimpaired people greater freedom and
flexibility and allows them to communicate
in real time from a variety of locations using a
range of mobile devices. It means customers
can now make faster, more fluent phone calls
using ordinary smartphones, tablets, laptops
and PCs instead of specialised terminals.
A free app, compatible with Android and
Apple devices and personal computers,
enables customers to use NGT with
internet-connected devices.
In the UK, more than 10m people, one in
six of the population, have some form of
hearing loss, and this is estimated to rise to
Placing the needs of abused children
and their families at the heart of any
intervention, the aim is to enable
professionals to carefully plan how to
approach each individual case from
discovery to recovery.
BT Consumer managing director Pete Oliver
said: “Online child protection is a critical
issue and one BT takes extremely seriously.
Our longstanding commitment has seen
us launch a partnership with UNICEF UK,
Internet Matters - a pan-ISP resource for
parents and our BT Parental Controls.
Called CLICK: Path to Protection, the
initiative is the first of its kind. BT and the
MCF want to ensure that every professional
working with child victims of online abuse
understands their individual role and those
of colleagues in other related organisations.
“We are very pleased and proud to
be associated with the Marie Collins
Foundation and such a valuable and
innovative project. It is vital that frontline
professionals in this area have the very best
training to better protect and help victims
and their families.”
❱ Massive Openreach
investment to reduce
customer faults
Pat Garland, general manager for
Openreach service delivery, said: “This
will not only stop the deterioration we see
in the network each year, but will improve
future performance.
Openreach aims to spend a massive £45m
this year on improving the state of its
network to reduce customer faults. This
year, the money will be spent on plans to
uplift 1,875 cabinets, remake more than
32,000 joints, survey more than 8,000
faulty nodes, and renew 9,000 cables.
It is calculated that this network
investment will offer huge benefits to
customers by saving around 107,000 visits
by engineers to repair faulty lines this year,
and that over each of the next five years it
will reduce the number of visits required by
more than 300,000.
“It’s about working smarter and putting the
customers first by investing much earlier in
the chain. By proactively fixing our network
and giving it the love and attention it
deserves, we will dramatically reduce fault
volumes so we don’t get faults developing
further down the line.
“By investing upfront it means we won’t
pay the price downstream with faulty nodes
that produce constantly repeating line
faults. Cabinets and nodes that constantly
go wrong will be flagged up
and given prompt attention.
To make this possible, some of the
The new service enables people with hearing
and speech impairment to communicate via
a range of mobile devices and PCs
14.5m people by 2031, according to
the charity Action Hearing Loss. More than
800,000 people in the UK are severely or
profoundly deaf.
Research by the University Campus Suffolk
(UCS) showed more than 96 per cent of
frontline professionals in the field said they
needed training to assess risk online, and 95
per cent felt they needed training to help
children and their families with recovery
from online abuse. The UCS research
has led to the partnership between the
MCF and BT for the pioneering scheme
to train police, education and children’s
services, health professionals, the Crown
Prosecution Service and non-governmental
organisation staff, as well as the judiciary.
The pilot will consist of four projects, in
England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and
Wales, which will be tested and evaluated
by UCS and then refined for rollout to all
frontline professionals working in this area.
money is being used to recruit additional
engineers into the business. “As more and
more engineering recruits come on board in
Openreach there will be more focus on
this area.”
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BT European Affairs Newsletter • December 2014 • www.bt.com/europeanaffairs
❱ BT opens four new customer innovation showcases across Europe
BT opened new customer innovation showcases in Amsterdam, Brussels, Madrid and Milan, together forming the European core of an
extensive global network of facilities where customers can test the latest networked IT innovations. These new showcases are designed to
help CIOs and their teams become more creative in the way they orchestrate technology.
The BT Customer Innovation Showcases provide an interactive experience which presents the latest solutions developed in
BT’s R&D centres to improve the efficiency of large organisations, deliver the applications critical to their success and keep their systems
secure. The showcases enable visitors not only to hear about BT capabilities, but to see, touch and feel them through live personalised
demonstrations.
BT’s European Customer Innovation Showcases provide live demonstrations of BT Connect (network services), BT One (unified
communications and collaboration services), BT Contact (customer relationship management services), BT Assure (security services)
and BT Compute (data centre and cloud services). The showcases also have a number of demos focused on how to effectively reap the
benefits of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) or on how to enable true supply chain collaboration for more informed decision making and
faster response time to changing environments.
❱ BT urges protection
against mobile threats
Mobile security breaches have affected
more than two-thirds of organisations
in the past year. However, according to
a new global study from BT, they are still
not taking sufficient security measures to
protect themselves.
The research explores the attitudes of
IT decision-makers towards security. It
shows 93 per cent of organisations allow
employees to use their own devices at work,
but only four in ten have a bring your own
device (BYOD) policy.
❱ Politicians visit
advanced BT data centre
European politicians have been shown how BT
provides guaranteed connectivity to major
customers in Italy.
Mark Hughes, president of BT Security, said:
“Today’s threat landscape shifts very quickly
so it is important for organisations to start
with security in mind, rather than add it
as an afterthought. “This will ensure that
security processes develop with them, and
not after them. This makes the task of being
security-led much more straightforward.”
“At BT, we are working with many leading
global organisations to help educate
them about security risks and put in
place proactive defences. When people
understand the repercussions of not
adhering to security practices, and are given
the tools to prevent them, organisations will
Staff attitudes remain the biggest threat to
data security, says BT research
truly become able to reap the many benefits
of mobility and BYOD.”
The politicians visited BT’s secure data
centre near Milan, Italy, so they could
see in detail what it means to guarantee
continuity, security and connectivity to
customers like Fiat, Mediaset and the Italian
stock exchange.
BT in Italy’s head of marketing and
communications, Carlo Ridolfi, said the
delegation of five people, including two
members of the European Parliament
(MEPs), wanted to experience technology
excellence and innovation at first hand.
The visit was arranged to the data centre
in the municipality of Settimo Milanese
because Italy currently holds the presidency
of the European Union. It also formed part
of a study visit by the parliament’s European
Internet Foundation (EIF). BT is a founding
business member of EIF.
BT vice-president of trade and international
affairs Till Kupfer said: “It’s important that
MEPs understand BT’s activities in the
business- to-business space and not just
consumer issues – particularly now with the
new European Commission prioritising the
digital single market and a new policy and
legislative plan due by mid-2015.”
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BT European Affairs Newsletter • December 2014 • www.bt.com/europeanaffairs
❱ New 112 service
could save more lives
The AML system will help police and other
emergency services pinpoint an incident’s
location when reported from a mobile device
A new service developed by BT, EE and
HTC will help the emergency services get to
incidents faster.
The service allows 112 calls from mobile
phones to be pinpointed much more
precisely. This will cut the handling time for
the emergency services so they can attend
incidents more quickly.
About 60 per cent of calls to the emergency
services in the UK are now made from
mobile phones. However, the location
information derived from mobile devices
is imprecise.
In an estimated 36,000 critical incidents
every year, the emergency services spend
30 minutes or more searching for the
location of an incident where the call was
made from a mobile.
The new Advanced Mobile Location
(AML) system is up to 4,000- times more
accurate than the current system and
typically identifies the source of a mobile
phone emergency call down to 0.003
square kilometres, less than half the size of
a football pitch, instead of several square
kilometres.
Developed by BT, EE and HTC working
closely over the last 12 months, AML is
currently only available for emergency calls
made on the EE network on all new HTC
phones.
BT’s 112 policy manager, John Medland,
said: “This is a major breakthrough and
will undoubtedly help save people’s lives.
“We’re really looking forward to the other
mobile networks and manufacturers making
this available too, and are working with all
UK mobile networks to help this happen.”
❱ Upbeat message from Chairman during India visit
BT Chairman Mike Rake visited Delhi and
delivered an upbeat message about the
future for bilateral trade between the UK
and India.
Mike was speaking at the India-UK Business
Summit where he appeared alongside UK
Business Secretary Vince Cable and the
presidents of the two main Indian business
associations, FICCI and CII.
Mike said business confidence in the two
countries was again on the rise and that
this augured well for increased bilateral
trade and for a re-invigoration of the
stalled European Union-India trade deal
negotiations.
He reminded delegates that the UK was
the biggest investor in India last year – with
greater investment than the US and Japan
combined – and that Indian foreign direct
investment in the UK is big and is growing,
such as via the Indian multinational group
Tata in the automotive sector.
During his visit, Mike met the new Indian
ICT Minister in the Modi Government,
❱ MPs take a look at
broadband benefits
Ravi Shankar Prasad, to discuss BT’s
enterprise business and policy conditions.
The Chairman saw the local community
projects in Delhi, where BT is supporting
education of the disadvantaged,
and hosted 50 customers at the
British High Commission.
UK Secretary of State for Culture, Media
and Sport Sajid Javid meets Openreach
apprentices James Crossley, Bethany Johnson
and Depak Varsani . Culture Secretary Sajid
Javid meets Openreach apprentices James
Crossley, Bethany Johnson and Depak Varsani
Twelve small companies joined BT in showing
ministers and MPs how fibre broadband has
boosted their business.
The showcase was organised at the Houses
of Parliament by BT’s public affairs team, and
included UK businesses ranging from software
providers to condiment makers, holiday parks
to laser-welding specialists.
“Fibre broadband is making a huge difference
to UK business, especially in rural areas
where its impact is now being felt,” said Tim
O’Sullivan, BT’s director of public affairs.
Tim added that the range of businesses taking
part was impressive – and that most of them
would not exist were it not for broadband.
“MPs heard first-hand from them how our
fibre network had enabled them to carve out
a market and create employment,” he said.
“The companies described how they could
meet by video link with customers and
employees no matter where they happened
to be, and how fibre broadband was proving
crucial in opening up new markets way
beyond their local areas.”
Among the attendees was Culture Secretary
Sajid Javid, who is responsible for overseeing
how broadband is being rolled out across the
UK as part of the government’s long-term
economic plan.
Also present were Welsh Office minister Alun
Cairns, the Prime Minister’s apprenticeship
ambassador Andrew Jones MP, and
frontbench shadow ministers.
Tim added that the showcase had clearly
driven home to the audience the message
that fibre broadband makes things happen.
“We also deliberately chose to include
businesses that are served by suppliers other
than BT, demonstrating the open nature
of Openreach’s network, which makes this
market so competitive,” he said.
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