Will 2015 be BTâs year?

It’s often the ‘sexy’ products and platforms emanating from Silicon Valley which capture the imaginations of pundits and the column inches of the press and media, but shortly before Xmas last year, telecoms veteran BT made the announcement of its return to the top table.

BT made it known they were in talks with 2 UK mobile operators, O2 and EE, to buy a carrier from their foreign owners, Deutsche Telekom and Spain’s Telefonica respectively. A few weeks later, this crystallised into a £12.5 billion proposed purchase of EE.

This is interesting not so much for the figures (which were welcomed by the City as a fair price), but for the facts of BT’s history: they had been out of mobile for over a decade, following their spin-out of Cellnet and its subsequent purchase by (ironically) Telefonica.

Back in the early noughties, mobile had sex appeal, and fixed-line telephony was once so unexciting that mobile analysts such as my wife called it POTS – short for Plain Old Telephone Service. It was just voices running along a declining number of wires, and City voices felt a mobile network like Cellnet would do better when freed from the management of stodgy old BT.

A decade and a half later, the consensus is that without strong data networks, mobile businesses are dull as ditchwater. My smartphone, tablet or connected wearable is only as good as the data signal it receives, and a fixed-line network is a competitive advantage in service quality and marketing.

It also allows BT to move forward with its strategy, similar to that of Sky, of bundling together networks and content, be it in the form of mobile, home broadband, TV or a combination thereof; the so-called “Quad Play Market”.

With BT, this can already be seen in its move to break the dominance of Sky in televised football. In this context, BT’s rivals may bring the move back to mobile to the attention of the regulator, but whatever the outcome of that, it seems BT is serious about being a powerful player in networks, data and entertainment in a new chapter of its history. One to watch…