To help you get an idea of the full extent of our activities, here are a few key facts about who we are and what we do.
In the UK alone, we manage some 21 million customers undertaking 12 million transactions every day. We connect a broadband line every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
We have 104,400 employees around the world, 93,000 of whom work in the UK, and our annual revenue is in the region of £2.2bn. Over 22% of our workforce are women, nearly 10% are from ethnic minorities, and 2% work with a disability.
We’re the UK’s biggest user of green energy. Almost half of our waste produce is recycled, and in the last ten years, we’ve cut our CO2 emissions by 60%. Since 2001, Dow Jones has named BT the Sustainability Leader among the world’s telecommunications companies for five years running.
Goonhilly in Cornwall is the largest satellite earth station in the world. Its 61 huge satellite dishes handle business data and millions of international phone calls and emails.
Now amazingly over 40 years old, the BT Tower in Central London is the nerve centre of a vast broadcasting and communications network which carries TV programmes, news, live outside broadcasts, telephone conversations and computer data via microwave radio.
18 out of the top 20 high street financial organisations depend on BT’s network to provide services to their customers. We process 80% of all UK credit card transactions – that’s more than 400,000 per hour. And across Europe, we handle up to 750 Visa debit and credit transactions per second, with 99.99% fault-free connectivity. Our customers include 20 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies, 80% of the FTSE 100 and 19 of the top 20 UK financial institutions.
There are more than 133,000 BT Public payphones nationwide - in the street, at airports, railway and tube stations, motorway service areas, shopping centres and rural locations. Using cellular radio technology, we also operate over 700 mobile payphones on trains, cross channel ferries and domestic coaches.
With around 10,000 patents, 2000 inventions, 6,000 technologies to date, BT employs 3,000 R&D people and invests £350m a year in developing and launching a continuous stream of innovative ideas.
For 2 years running we have been named by Gartner as the world’s most cost-effective provider of mainframe services. In 2004 – 2005, Cisco named us their Global Service Provider of the Year for managed Services, and we also hold Gold accreditations from Nortel, Oracle, Avaya, Cisco and Siebel.
BT Global Services holds the largest market share of any European data comms provider. We are the largest cabling installer in the UK and the third largest Microsoft Exchange System in the world, managing over 107,000 accounts and processing 1 million emails a day.
To look after our customers, we employ 16,000 agents, 16,000 field engineers and 2,500 sales people. In the last 18 months, our service staff have achieved a 200% increase in client facing time, a 40% improvement in service levels and a 17% reduction in costs.
We offer network coverage in more than 120 countries across five continents. Our MPLS network can be accessed from 60 countries, making it one of the largest in the world – and still growing.
More than 95% of reported faults are fixed by the end of the next working day. In 98% of cases, we have the correct part available on the same day – usually within two hours.
