BT to pay record fine of £42 mn

BT will pay a record fine of £42 million and has also agreed to pay rivals up to £300 million after it admitted to breaching rules by failing to compensate other operators over delays to installing Ethernet lines.

The fine is the largest yet on a telecoms provider. The failings were committed by the company's Openreach arm, which was used by providers such as TalkTalk and Vodafone to develop and maintain their networks across the UK.

The probe by telecoms regulator, Ofcom revealed that between January 2013 and December 2014, BT misused the terms of its contracts to cut compensation payments owed to telecoms providers for not delivering Ethernet services on time.

Ethernet services are high-speed cables used by large businesses, and mobile and broadband providers, to transmit data, which also provide high-capacity links for hospitals, schools and libraries.

''These high-speed lines are a vital part of this country's digital backbone. Millions of people rely on BT's network for the phone and broadband services they use every day,'' said Gaucho Rasmussen, Ofcom's investigations director.

''We found BT broke our rules by failing to pay other telecoms companies proper compensation when these services were not provided on time. The size of our fine reflects how important these rules are to protect competition and, ultimately, consumers and businesses,'' he said.

''Our message is clear – we will not tolerate this sort of behaviour.''

Clive Selley, the chief executive of Openreach, in a statement said that the company apologises ''wholeheartedly for the mistakes.''

''This issue is unrepresentative of the vast majority of work conducted by Openreach and we are committed to delivering outstanding service for our customers,'' he said.

''We take this issue very seriously and we have put in place measures, controls and people to prevent it happening again,'' added Gavin Patterson, chief executive of BT Group.