BT Group has revealed that it will be increasing investment to speed up migration of copper ADSL to superfast broadband, improve customer experience, enhance FTTP presence to 4 million by March 2021 and accelerate 5G coverage.

EE will launch 5G in 16 cities in 2019 with a range of 5G smartphone makers. The initial phase will be in the UK’s four capital cities plus Birmingham and Manchester, followed by the busiest areas of 10 more cities, on 1,500 existing 4G sites. BT is yet to reveal more details on its 5G business.

BT on Thursday said its capital expenditure (excluding BDUK clawback) for fiscal 2019-20 will be £3.7 billion – £3.9 billion as compared with £3.963 billion (+13 percent) in fiscal 2018-19.

BT Group CEO Philip Jansen said: “We need to invest to improve our customer propositions and competitiveness. We need to invest to stay ahead in our fixed, mobile and core networks, and we need to invest to overhaul our business to ensure that we are using the latest systems and technology to improve our efficiency and become more agile.”

BT made investment of £994 million (+8 percent) in consumer, £501 million (+2 percent), £245 million (–12 percent) in global services and £2,081 million (+22 percent) in Openreach. The main focus consumer spending was on the preparation of its 5G network in select cities on UK.

The main focus of BT’s capital expenditure at £3,963 million, including network investment of £2,083 million (+21 percent), was on increasing spend on Fibre Cities program.

BT lowered mobile investment as the Emergency Services Network (ESN) passed the peak deployment phase. BT’s spending was £929 million on customer driven investments, £747 million on systems and IT, and £204 million spent on non-network infrastructure.

BT reported revenue of £23.428 billion (–1 percent) and profit before tax of £2.666 million (+2 percent) during fiscal 2018-19.

BT has generated revenue of £16.695 billion (+3 percent) from consumer, £6.292 billion (–5 percent) from enterprises, £4.735 billion (–6 percent) from global services and £5.075 billion (–4 percent) from Openreach.

BT generated monthly ARPU of £38.8 from fixed, £20.9 from post-paid mobile and £7.9 from pre-paid mobile.

BT Group is estimating that its revenue will be down around 2 percent during the fiscal 2018-19 as a result of the challenging market conditions, regulatory pressure in both fixed and mobile markets, and the impact from exit of lower margin products in enterprise businesses.

Investment

BT Group said FTTP build targets increased from 3 million to 4 million premises passed by March 2021.

Openreach passed 2 million premises with Gfast and 1.2 million with FTTP. Openreach is now passing 20,000 premises with FTTP per week.

BT has enhanced its target to pass 4 million premises with ultrafast FTTP technology by 2020/21, up from 3 million, and an ambition to pass 15 million premises by the mid-2020s, up from 10 million.