BT Group plc

Okay, good afternoon everybody. Welcome to the BT Networks investor briefing. I think the last time I stood up and did an investor briefing was in 2019 when it was as technology. You've heard recently from digital, so we're sort of completing the technology unit's picture today by talking about networks. So I'm Howard Watson. I'm BT's Chief Technology Officer. And I'm joined today by many of my team who are in the room here today. And you specifically, in the agenda that you see here, are going to hear from Neil McRae, who is our chief architect and is responsible for our network strategy. You'll also hear from Greg McCall, who runs what we call service platforms. He builds and runs the technical solutions that our CFUs create into products and then sell to our customers. And then Tim Whitley will talk to us about applied research and how we're active and remain active in the research area. And then Emily Clarke, who is the CFO of Networx, will talk to you about our financial delivery and outlook. And then we'll have a Q&A. both in the room here and for those joining on WebEx. And then for those of you who are in the room, we have a treat. We're going down to the first floor to show you the Future Zone. And we're going to give you a drink as well if you'd like one. So thank you for joining us here this afternoon. What we're going to cover today, and just to summarize that all on this chart here, is we are very much on the journey that we've laid out before, which is a 2030 sort of network strategy and vision. And that's built upon the unique and unparalleled assets that we have in both fixed and mobile in BT. but also centered around how we are continuing to invest in converging those networks, creating great services through that, but also in making them simpler and therefore easier to run. What's critical for us is continuing to attract a real great diverse pool of technology talent. And we'll talk about that today and why that is important for us. And then how we use that talent to work with the business and the CFUs to create really great standout solutions that are built on those leading network capabilities, differentiate BT ahead of our competitors in the marketplace here, and contribute towards the growth agenda. We'll also talk about how we're applying research, again with that same aim, but also targeting sustainability in all of the customer outcomes that we're driving. And then also, and critically important, how we are structurally transforming our cost base to deliver sustainable long-term OPEX saving in how we run networks. So, just quickly, in terms of what networks underpins in BT, these numbers are all very familiar to you. So, 30 million consumer customers representing more than 50% of the households in the UK, supplemented by a million plus enterprise customers enabled with business services, both in the UK and across 180 countries globally through BT Global. In terms of where we are, 7.2 million plus 5G-ready customers now. That's grown 120% in the last 12 months. And in consumer, we now have well in excess of a million FTTP customers. And then back to that important research for a theme, more than 5,000 patents in our ever-growing portfolio. And then looking at that from a network point of view, so if you think about both mobile and fixed access networks, my organization builds the mobile network, both the core and the access part of that, but we also build the fixed network. We are the ISP for downstream BT. And again, real differentiated KPIs, again, compared to the other players in the UK market. So 99% overall 4G population coverage, by far the largest 4G geographic coverage, some 250,000 square miles, more than anybody else. first to get beyond the 50% mark on 5G population coverage, and the only way to set a long-term target for getting 5G to 90% geographic coverage of the UK by 2028. On the fixed side, We ensure that downstream BT can consume what open reach a building, so that today is 7.6 million premises available for fiber to the premise, coupled with the existing 29 million plus premises on Superfast. Collected together, that's delivering 28 terabits per second as a total traffic peak. of which if you look at the graph below, 25 million is driven by broadband, the rest by ethernet in the peak. And then another key important part of what networks do is we actually underpin Openreach's rollout of 25 million homes by December 2026, because through the exchange estate, networks play a critical role there, making space for Openreach to build their head ends into that infrastructure. And again, the other key thing here is just the breadth of assets that I have at my disposal now, many of which are managed and run by Openreach as the operating entity for those. But just some examples, 20,000 phone boxes. We're sort of in this, are they all going to go? Which ones are we going to keep? Which are going to be turned into defibrillators or libraries? What's critically important is they all have power. They all have some sort of backhaul, and they're all pretty good as a site for small sales. So we're going to see increasingly a use there. Similarly, the Wi-Fi hotspots that we have, 18,000, plus also 5.6 million enabled by the hubs in our customers' premises. And then in the future, a lot of work in thinking about the long-term keeper exchanges. You'll hear us talk about... We don't need 5,600 in the future, we will need 1,000, and those will be perfect as sites in which to build edge compute and other infrastructure as our industry evolves. And similarly, as FTTC reduces, then actually some quite significant street-side cabinet furniture that we're thinking about how we would reuse as well. The key thing, though, about our network, when I sort of look at it in terms of what we deliver to our key internal customers and then they deliver to end customers, really is the scale of that network and the economics that come with that scale, particularly in our fixed core, for example. But also, the reach of that network, we by far have the furthest reach for Ethernet, for example, being terminated at the exchanges that we've got across the country. And then increasingly, the one thing that really stood the test of the pandemic was the five nines availability of the core network. So our ability to keep the internet and broadband running for our customers We all saw the noise that the cable operator in the UK had during that period. Our ability to keep that running was unmatched through that COVID period. So, you know, and it's not just what we say. We're continually benchmarked, particularly in mobile, where there's a really mature benchmarking industry and continue to win the best network awards there. And that network, that credentials that we have that differentiate that network, I think is probably best embodied by how critical we are to the UK's critical national infrastructure. And you see some examples of that on this slide here. So 99.7% road coverage by mobile for the emergency services network. We underpin the technology that sits in our 6999 call centers, 39 million emergency calls handled this year, and it's continuing to grow at the moment. Met Police, 500 London sites that we provide with their wide area network, and we provide IP telephony solutions for. And then one of the things that we actually talked to the Ministry of Defence about is we're quite proud that we actually have a 100-year partnership with the Ministry of Defence. There's a wonderful picture somewhere of a horse in the First World War with a radio system on it described as the first mobile phone. Maybe a slight exaggeration, but it's a good example of how BT were in the trenches, as the post office then, helping with communications on the battlefield. And that relationship continues. And then last but by no means least, the NHS, where 110 live trusts with BT and 80 million smart messages delivered regularly through the vaccination campaign, both COVID and flu. So just moving to our network strategy, and then I'm going to hand to the team to delve a bit deeper into it. We're all very familiar with this slide, the BT strategy and our purpose and our ambition. And what you can see there bottom right is how we in networks specifically underpin that strategy. So best converged network, great world-class technologists, standout network experience. We'll work through those over the course of the next 30 to 40 minutes. But just to sort of really pick a headline for me here, and Neil will talk more about this, but really critical to what we're doing right now is how we evolve this great network we already have, which differentiates ourselves in our marketplace into a even greater, simplified, flexible platform for growth. And that's very much built on 5G and FTTP being the access technologies. So a bit of an assumption that the access bottleneck that the industry has had for some time starts to be removed. But also, we're doing more than anybody in the UK to think about how we get to those hard, Hard to reach areas either with FTTP or with 5G and looking at small cells, fixed wireless access, neutral host solutions for in-building, the shared rural network getting to 88% geo coverage by 2024. We were the only app operator in Connected Nations to add significant geographic coverage last year, and we're still building that. But also looking at satellite connectivity, we have a partnership with OneWeb for that. And then also ensuring that that network can absolutely evolve, and we're well on this journey already for robust edge computing, and we've also deployed our network cloud infrastructure. And through that, we get the key outcomes at the bottom here, you can see, which is really having a great simplified set of APIs that brings network as a service to life. Through that, really having a great programmable network and an architecture that gives customers access to that automation and programmability. And in doing that and enabling that, leveraging the data that is produced by that network, Once we've got that all in place, it enables this as the outcome, as you can see on here. So a simpler network with lower costs but with greater capability. Connectivity for everything. Remember our ambition and also talking about devices and machines, how we bring a network that is best for machines and best for devices is as critical as best for people. simple network as a service APIs, giving us a much faster time to market through significant increases in automation and through that driving the ability to really innovate in services. So that's what we'll cover during the course of today, plus more. With that, I'm going to hand to Neil McRae, who'll talk about our strongest foundations. Neil.

Thank you, Howard. Thanks, everyone, for coming. Welcome to BT. And for those of you not been here before, this is our new HQ. It's a phenomenal building that really allows our engineers and developers to build what I like to think about as the strongest foundations. So I'm going to talk about our network. I'm going to talk about how secure it is. I'm going to talk about how it enables network as a service. I'm going to talk about the edge. And I'm going to talk about the people that make it happen. And those are the foundations for a strong network. As Howard says, we're on a path to simplicity and that's the other key foundation. Today's telco is mired with lots of legacy networks, lots of legacy platforms that over time we're moving away from to move towards a very simple, all IP enabled network, leveraging cloud technology, using the benefits of new and modern capabilities in optical and in Ethernet to bring a high bandwidth, high available and importantly secure network. So we clearly have a fantastic rollout of 5G, more than 50% across the UK. We'll continue to augment that with macro and small cells build. FTTP with the fantastic work that Openreach are doing and rolling out FTTP across the country. We're backing that up with a network that's scaled for the ultra-fast wall where, you know, 10 or 20 meg used to be the The meter, now we're in 100, 200, up to one gig and beyond. And then using that fiber network to connect our 5G cell sites together. So not only are you on 5G with the little badge in your phone, but you're getting that 5G experience. And then enabling the infrastructure for millions of customers. It's not just about some customers in one place. It's about having a national capability that enables customers wherever they are. And then leveraging new technologies. So Howard mentioned our partnership with OneWeb. That's about connecting people that are in the harder places to connect, but also about connecting devices and other perhaps lower bandwidth services where the power of satellite enables us to connect them in a way that fiber or mobile might not be able to reach. We do this through our converged IP core. This is a platform that delivers our services for fixed customers and mobile customers and actually converged customers, customers who use both our fixed network and our mobile network. And we've developed a platform called BT Network Cloud, taking the best out of the hyperscalers, taking their technology and building it into our platform to enable scale up and scale down and to enable us to get to market with products really quickly. And then all of that's underpinned with high capacity. BT has a long heritage in optical communications and leveraging the high bandwidth that optical communications brings us. But in order to achieve that simplicity, we've also got to tackle the legacy. And you'll have heard many telcos talk about this, and we're really on an aggressive path to close down some of these legacy platforms. 3G. With the advent of 4G and now 5G, we just don't need the 3G network anymore, and we're working with our customers to turn that off. alarm systems, so we have a strong heritage in the security industry where we provide connectivity to connect alarms, be it security alarms, fire alarms, many other different types of technology. Again, all copper-based, but we're moving those customers to new modern IP technologies that aren't just about the connectivity, but actually bring analytics and other capabilities as we migrate the customers to them. And then clearly, the PSTN, we're turning off the legacy telephone system. That's a huge platform. It's actually the only technology that's in every single BT exchange. We're winding that down, we're optimizing it, and we're moving customers, again, to new future communication products, both in residential and in business, that can add value to their experience and add value to their business. And then that allows us to turn off the platforms. PDHSDH, a huge technology. that takes up tons of space, uses loads of power. We're able to turn that off as we turn off all these other products and services. And X25, still used actually quite highly by the banking industry. We're working with that industry to migrate away from X25 onto modern IP services. What's the so what on that? The so what on that is we're able to turn off or close 4,500 exchanges. So if you were to build BT today, you'd build it with 1,000 exchanges, 1,000 central offices across the country. That allows a huge win on energy. It allows a huge win in our run costs. And clearly, most importantly, allows us to keep the simplicity in the network, which allows us to focus on customers. We're piloting the closure of five exchanges right now, one here in London, to understand the ramifications of that and to make sure that we take customers on that journey with us. Network Cloud, so I mentioned this earlier on. When we were looking at how we build the network of the future, one of the things we did is we went out and talked to many different organizations. We also had some learning, things like the Olympics, some of our other big customers that are running very high available technologies or capabilities or need high available network. And what we decided was that one of the great advantages of cloud technology was the ability to automate it, the ability to scale it up, and the ability to keep it running 24 by 7 so you can take one part of it down, upgrade it, and put it back into service without anybody knowing. but also allows us, most importantly, to launch new services and new capabilities very quickly that are fully automated and our customers can engage with in a digital way. It also enables network as a service, and I'll come on to that shortly. But we have this platform up and running. It's serving many of our network applications today. We're in 12 locations across the BT network, over 2,000 servers. It's all software driven. We're leveraging the latest in telemetry and API based technology and cloud native technology to enable a platform that scales as we need it. And then it also allows us to effectively run applications under our control, under the demands that we as a telco have as opposed to what the hyperscalers can offer us. And crucially, it allows us to scale up and down. So if you imagine New Year's Eve when you send that text message to all your friends at 23.39, hoping that it arrives by midnight, with today's technology, we can just scale up the SMS platforms, get all those messages out, and then scale it down. Further to that, what Network Cloud really allows us to do is create network as a service. This is where the network itself becomes an object in programming so that you can, as a customer or as a developer or as a member inside BT, You can write code to grab a piece of network, create a piece of network that could be a high-speed path from London to Glasgow. It could be an SMS service. It could be a voicemail service. But through APIs, you're able to set up a network capability, leverage it in the way that you want, and then stop using it. on-demand capability is something that's really important as the whole world moves to kind of digital on-demand experience. We can give this in real time to customers and we can do a lot of customization. You can join one piece of our network to another very simply just by thinking about it in a simple piece of code. The network as a service platform also gives us instant ability to tackle faults. So by understanding what's happening using real time telemetry, we know instantly if there's a problem in the network and the network itself can then actually understand where that problem is, use the network as a service component to create a workaround and to ensure that customers aren't affected by any problems in the network. We can then bring in telemetry and really crucially, AI and analytics so that we can understand what the network's being used for, how it's performing, and as we want to continue to be the network leader, we can reset the benchmark every day if we choose about what network leadership really means. And then we also can co-locate with the public cloud providers, bringing our network close to them, enabling us to market their services to our customers and work in partnership with the public cloud and public cloud services. That brings us to edge. And edge, probably many are thinking is, what is the edge? And I kind of like to think of it as the place where we bring customers together. We are moving, in the past, we would centralize where customers connected to. It could be in London or it could be in Manchester and Birmingham. In the future, We're bringing the service portion of the capabilities that we offer much more closer to the customer. What does that mean? First of all, it means we have lower latency. So applications are much more snappy. Secondly, it means if you're using high definition video, we can process that and use analytics on site. So we have a customer that's experimenting with 8K video today. To actually carry all that back to the cloud and process it is largely impossible. It's just too difficult to do it. So we can actually work with that customer, use BT Network Cloud on his premise to build a solution that allows him to get out of that video what he wants. In this case, it's a customer building engines, and they want to understand how all the components come together. And the power of Edge with private 5G networks really allows us to do that. also allows us to make things much more secure. We're securing one simple single platform. We can give out light terminals, thin terminals that allow customers just to run an app on the screen when actually the apps back in the central office or in our exchange, making security much easier for us to manage. As I mentioned with the example, it makes bandwidth optimization really easy. That allows us to monetize that in several ways. So building solutions is clearly one way of us engaging directly with customers, but we can partner with the public cloud companies and offer them edge compute services. We can take our edge platform to wherever we need it for the services of the future as AR and VR become more and more prevalent in industry and in entertainment. And then we can offer an end-to-end solution where we are working from a BT side with compute all the way all over the world to wherever that compute requirement is needed and offer customers a consistent and and service level aware solution for their applications and what they need to do with their own customers. And we're really well placed. We've got a hundred very high bandwidth core sites across the UK. We have a thousand tier one exchanges that are also very well connected and very connected close to customers. both from a fixed network point of view, but also from a 5G point of view. All of our interconnects to open reach on FTP and to our 5G network are in these locations. That allows us to have the best service for customers because we've got the strongest FTP footprint and the best 5G and 4G network. You can't build a network that customers trust unless you can show it's secure. And security is one of the most important fundamental features of our network. I'll start by saying we have 3,000 security experts in BT. Howard mentioned our long relationship with government in this space. That really has built a core foundation of security expertise and skills and knowledge. Not just in defending, but actually understanding how attacks work and building the future security solutions way ahead of the bad guys coming at them with us. We have a number of global security operation centers. We continuously monitor. We have a very in-depth analytics platform that was built up at BTR Astro Labs that allows us to really see what's going on in the security space and for us to react ahead of time to any security threat that comes in. We've also started to look at threat assessment. So as we work with more partners, as we bring more customers on, understanding what their threat assessment is as we work with them can allow us to stay on top of any future security issues. And then we do what a number of other organizations do. We continually war game, understanding what's out there and how it might affect us. Red teaming, we have a fantastic team that goes out there and actually tests that what we say that we can deliver, we can actually deliver, and the network is as secure as it should be. And then we balance this with a set of controls so that we are in an area where we are happy with the risks that we are taking. And that's something that we continually look at and we continually measure. And as world events change, we can adjust what those controls are. But it's a phenomenal area where more and more of our customers want to understand what our security capabilities are and not only Do we use them internally? We actually offer many of these services and solutions to our customers across the world. And protecting BT is crucial to building that trust that we talk about in our strategy that enables customers to engage with us with their business and their telecommunication requirements. And then one of the key foundations, I mentioned this at the start, talent and people. We have 7,000 engineers across networks. Every year we bring in 400 apprentices and graduates and we refresh and bring in new people, younger people with different experiences of using the network and what they can bring as we develop our network. We have over 300... researchers in BT Labs in the National Park and Tim's going to talk a bit more about them later on. But we're looking at everything that's coming down the line that can help us build an even better and more secure network. But also BT is seen as a really fantastic place to have a technology career and I'm personally proud of this. We're winning people away from organisations like Ericsson, like Google, like NTT and Cisco and bringing that fantastic skill base into BT and leveraging their knowledge and their skills to really drive our purpose, which is to connect for good. Something that many of our people here truly believe in. And then together with that, it's about teamwork and bringing people together. So we're driving an inclusive culture. We're driving a culture where people work together. Any idea that they have, they can bring their viewpoint from their experiences to the sort of network and solutions we need to build for a diverse customer base and a diverse community. We really empower strong engagement, working with our teams and challenging our teams and supporting them so that they can be the best that they can be. We invest in them with digital and cloud expertise, and I'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. We have world-class technical pathways. So when engineers are learning, they're at their most excited, and we want to feed that thirst for knowledge and skills. And we invest in training and coaching and many other programs to give our engineers the very latest and best in technical knowledge. And then our leaders. It's important, as an engineer, I always remember this. Having a leader that not only talks the talk but walks the walk really inspires our engineers. And we're doing a lot to ensure that our leaders have a technical background, a network background, and a commercial background that can drive the right engagement with the teams. Because as you know, today, it's a real challenge maintaining talent and keeping them engaged and keeping them within your organization. It's important that we attract new talent, but it's also super important that we don't lose any talent as well. And that brings me to some of the initiatives that we've got in this space. Re-engage is a program where we're reaching out to mothers that have perhaps paused their career whilst they have children and try to bring them back into BT. and to engage in technology. And that's a fantastic program that we've just kicked off. The Leader Lab, I mentioned this earlier on, we're taking our top leaders to universities and other organizations so that they can learn what's happening in technology so that they themselves understand it and they can drive that technology in their organizations. The technical fellowship, something that I'm super proud of here at BT, this is about giving our engineering community a career path about expertise. So as they develop their own expertise, we recognise it both in giving them a standing, but also actually in the and the pay and rewards that they receive. And we create a momentum for this learning and knowledge growth that allows all of our engineers to develop. And Howard and I were just on a call about that. The momentum behind that is massive. And then I talked about specific learning programs. Cloud technology is something that is prevalent everywhere right now. And actually, there's a lot more to it than most people realize. It's not just about getting an AWS certification. For sure, that's valuable. But actually, what we want are the engineers that understand how to build a cloud, not just leverage a cloud. So we created the network cloud learning platform. It's a massively technical program that allows everybody in BT, actually not just people in networks, but anyone who wants to learn the underlying technology and how it works, we've built this program for them to do that. Actually, that's been hugely important as we migrate from what we call a TDM or time division multiplexing world, the old voice world, into this all IP world. And so I just want to finish off and just reiterate some of the key points. We're building a secure, simple to operate, automatic, highly scalable network platform that's built for the ultra-fast world, 5G and FTTP. that allows our customers to engage at the edge, but also allows them to run applications in the Cloud where we can connect them. This is something that we're doing at a fundamental level, looking at every aspect of the network to see how it should be built, understanding the underlying technologies, and leveraging our great engineers to build it and put it in place. I'm going to hand over to Greg, who's going to talk about some of our customers.

Thank you, Neil. And good afternoon, everyone. It's lovely to see you all. My name is Greg McCall, and I run Service Platforms here in BT. And I have to say, whenever I describe my job, I always talk about it as I have the best job in the UK. I'm delivering products and services to our customers in more than 50% of households across the UK. And we also deliver those same products and services to enterprises across the globe. I work with some of the best brains in Britain to deliver these services, and I feel really, really proud of that. And who couldn't be excited about doing that? So I'm going to start by talking about standout customer experiences. I think our customers are at the center of everything we do, and I'll try and bring to life some of those experiences that we deliver. So I'm going to start off by talking about what we've framed the new network leadership. And I think the new network leadership is all about customer-centric solutions where we deliver both capacity and coverage wherever our customers need it. We'll enable this through a digital API layer that will give our customers the freedom and flexibility to tailor their networks as their business needs change. Imagine being in a business where you can do that at a click of a button rather than have to phone a call center. And we honestly believe that the power of our 5G network and our FDTP network, coupled with the converged core that Neil mentioned, puts us in a really, really strong position to give our customers that flexibility to help them to simplify their businesses. And as they do that, not only will they simplify their operations for them, but we can simplify our operations as well. So that is what we are calling the new network leadership. I think it's well scripted and well documented that we've had network leadership as defined currently for many years. And this is something that we are super, super proud of. It's been externally benchmarked and we continue to lead the way. We are certainly not complacent and we'll continue to work at that to ensure that we deliver that exceptional service both in fixed and in mobile. We have brilliant assets. We have 12% more spectrum than both Vodafone and 3. We have 24% more spectrum than O2. But it's not just about the quantity of the spectrum, it's the kind of spectrum that we've got as well. We've really got a spectrum in the sweet spot, which is at the 26 and 1800 megahertz band. The reason why this is a sweet spot, because it's great for coverage and capacity. The fantastic thing about the spectrum as well is as technology has moved on, the spectrum is supported by 4x4 MIMO, and many of the new devices today support that technology, which will improve both uplink and downlink services to our customers. So I think we'll show you some of the uplink kind of solutions that are super important later. But before we get onto that, I think it's probably worth us just mentioning the fantastic work that we've done on our fixed network as well. We've had a relentless focus on ensuring that customers are at the center of everything we do here in networks. And as we've built out our fixed network, we are leveraging the great work that Openreach have done in rolling out fiber. We've coupled that with our core. And I think it's really important to remember that when people think about their broadband service, they think about what the line is coming into the house, what their Wi-Fi is, but they forget that the reason why they have connectivity is to go and do the great things on the internet. whether that is surfing websites or doing Teams calls or making voice calls. And we have the best fixed call network in the UK. And that is where we differentiate against our competitors. We also work very, very closely with content providers who use our network to distribute their content and caching providers to ensure that we can optimize that experience so that every customer gets a brilliant experience at any time of the day that they're trying to use our service. So I think over time, the network has become more and more of a utility, especially as more apps and services get delivered that require connectivity. I think we also saw during COVID, many of our behaviors changed. We were all sat at home rather than rooms like this. And every one of you would be dialing into this call rather than listening to a single person. And I think it's really, really important to recognize that we believe that those changes that were introduced during COVID are here to stay. What that's done is it's really changed our traffic profile where we see a lot more capacity being used in our network during the day, than historically where most of it was used later at night and during peak hours. The great thing here at BT is we've always dimensioned our network for the peak hour. We wanted to make sure that our customers got a great experience at any time of the day they wanted to use our service. And because we dimensioned our network for the peak hour, it meant as that extra capacity shifted to early in the day, we didn't have to invest in extra capacity because our network was ready to take it. In mobile, we've also seen the shift. And what we've seen is people's habits have shifted to late in the day. But the great thing there is we started to roll out our 5G network three and a bit years ago. And we've got really, really good traction rolling out that network. And therefore, that network with the 3.5 gigahertz spectrum has really enabled us to support that extra capacity late in the day. I think most of us, when we think about our connectivity, certainly my kids and my wife, they don't talk about broadband, they talk about Wi-Fi, and we think Wi-Fi is a really important ingredient in our new network leadership. We've done a great job of digitising the country and building great connectivity into the home, you know, up to one gigabit per second speeds, and we deliver that to, let's say, the front door of the home. I think our job with Wi-Fi is to ensure that it doesn't matter where in your home you are, you will continue to get that great speed in any room. And we believe that Wi-Fi, as it evolves, will deliver similar type experiences because we've all heard about those ultra-low latency services that 5G private networks will deliver. And we are pushing the new Wi-Fi to deliver similar services. And I think that's going to be super important. as our customers start using different use cases. So I think virtual reality is something we've all dabbled with. I was on the West Coast a couple of weeks ago, and seeing some companies, what they're developing there is just tremendous. With one other university, they've already started to do remote learning through virtual reality. And they gave an example where if you're a biology student, rather than having to cut open a rat, which I wasn't a massive fan on, I have to be honest. We did this through virtual reality and it was pretty awesome. And they believe that the marks that the students are getting now, having done one semester through virtual reality, has gone up two points. So a real, real opportunity to bring that to life through the networks that we deliver. I think cloud gaming is another one, and what we call enhanced video conferencing. We all spend endless hours every day on video conferences, and I think we probably all berate the fact that we have back-to-back conferences most days. But spare a thought, because I spare a thought to all of you because I do it, but spare a thought to those poor networks, they have to deal with all that extra traffic. And as video conferencing gets further enhanced, what we'll see is photorealistic avatars being used, giving that 3D experience where the camera will follow your eyes rather than when you look aside, people see the side of your face. It's going to be absolutely so much better for all of us that spend time on that, but just bear in mind that the networks have to be able to cope with that extra traffic and those extra experiences, and that's what we're building. We'll also see a huge growth in the number of devices, applications, sensors connecting to our network and we need to make sure that we continue to build that as well. We also believe that Wi-Fi, as it evolves, will be an extension of the private network for those less critical applications that require connectivity and high bandwidth. So as we extend our network platform, we see lots of things evolving. And we'll start with small cells. I think we're going to see a huge growth in the number of small cells in our network, both within building and outdoor. And we need to ensure that as we deliver this, we embrace neutral host solutions, but equally use the assets that Howard spoke about earlier to deliver that connectivity wherever our customers need it. Smart cities coupled with smart transport networks is another really important area of growth, and it's great to see the standards being ratified now, and we're doing a number of trials to think about how we can bring that to life, connecting sensors, managing traffic, and ensuring that that is a great experience. Private networks, especially for applications where autonomy and autonomous robots have to work within those factories to optimize the efficiency of a factory. Delivering a 5.9 service, we believe we can deliver and we've already started to deliver through our private networks. And we've also seen in some of the ports, so the Belfast Harbour, we've done a number of things. We've also, hopefully you've seen, we've just signed the Port of Tyne deal as well. And we are moving away from delivering bits and bytes in our network to delivering containers in a port. That's how important what we are doing is. And then finally, I think if you think about broadcast networks, and we have a great set of credentials in BT of delivering broadcasts, so more than 90% of linear TV goes over one of our networks and is dealt with by our teams. But as we think about broadcasts becoming more IP-based, we are well-placed to be able to deal with that as well. And just to give you a couple of stats, the DTT multiplexes, so that linear network, that covers 98.5% of households. So we all think TV is everywhere, doesn't quite get there. Digital radio, we all have those moments, we're driving through our cars and you get those dead spots. Digital radio covers 97.3%. If you combine all of the four mobile networks in the UK, you get to about 99% population coverage. And if you look at BT's network, where we're delivering fixed network connectivity at 10 megabits per second, we are at 99.6%. So we are very, very well placed as broadcast moves to IP to be able to deliver those services as well. So I think from our side, 5G, it's really, really important that it's not only about the technology, but it's also the enabler for digitization for all industries, and that we also can drive real growth through 5G as well. And I think the good news is the standards worked with industry right from the beginning to ensure that we can meet the kind of use cases that a digital industrialization needs. So, I think there's loads of exciting things that are happening already in 5G, and what we are seeing is, for example, rail and road planning is made a lot better and a lot simpler through 5G services. Warehouse space optimization, I know it sounds really, really boring, but if you've got a warehouse like Amazon Prime that's shipping stuff every single day, every second of every day, making sure that we can optimize that space through a 5G private network. And then, you know, little things that were probably very, very close to us and we all worried about two and a half years ago. If you think about the NHS hospitals and ensuring that if you did get sick, there was a bed available for you. Optimising that bed utilisation in hospitals is what we've been working with the NHS on as well. So I think there's loads of things around this that we'll continue to deliver, and we've got to bring to life that real reliability, ultra-low latency, the responsiveness of our network, and ensuring that we can deliver that in a flexible way to meet the needs of our customers. So as I said earlier, I think the real story here is really around growth, and we see our networks being the fuel of driving that growth within BT. So this slide really depicts what we're moving from and moving to. So we see ourselves moving away from standalone private networks to a hybrid macro network that utilizes both private networks and our hybrid macro network. We also believe we move away from connectivity to the platform plus type service that Neil mentioned earlier. From a standalone set of network components to end-to-end solutions that meet our customers' needs. and moving from bespoke commercial models to ensuring that we deliver as-is service models so we can all benefit of driving that productivity, not only within our industry, but into our customers as well. So I think that hopefully brings to life why I believe I have the best job in the UK. I'm super excited about technology and the brilliant things that our fantastic engineers will deliver. And I think there's... a great opportunity for us to continue to see this evolve over the coming months and years. And I think we will definitely be underpinning those standard customer solutions and using our leading network credentials to do that. So with that, I'm going to hand over to Tim.