What is the biggest change you have seen in the telecommunications industry recently?

The whole telecommunications industry clearly has a vision that the customer is now king, and BT shares that. We need to move from being a product and network-based company to being a service-based company.

What is the significance of BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN) ?

21CN is a global, real-time open platform, based on internet protocol and we want to put everything into the software layer.

The key is that we are not talking about an overlay network, but changing things at the core of BT’s infrastructure.

No other telco is replacing all of the public switched telephone network, but some are putting in overlays and claiming this constitutes a brand new network. BT is doing end-to-end quality of service and monitoring from a customer standpoint ­ there was a time when, if the line went down, we did not know about it until the customer told us. Now BT knows at the same time as the customer.

What is BT doing to comply with Ofcom proposals on the deregulation of wholesale broadband provision?

Regulation is not my area of expertise, but we do have a good relationship with Ofcom, as evidenced by our agreement to form a separate access division in Openreach. The way local loop unbundling was regarded was that if enough customers were lost through making access equal, Ofcom would be lighter on regulation, so in a generic sense BT is doing fine.

BT pledged last year to reduce its staff by 5,000 by mid-2008, how is that going?

Those figures were misreported at the time ­ we essentially have a rolling replacement of staff with people leaving as they retire. We are also bringing in other people, around 5,000 for Openreach, and moving people away from middle management into more operational roles. We have replaced about 2,500 people so far, but the process is ongoing.

What was the thinking behind the BT Design and BT Operate restructuring?

It was really focused on making customer experience the priority. We also wanted to make our market-facing units line up against specific customer segments, and have a separate unit focus on delivering new software and services to customers. It is an ongoing change, sort of like a big upscaling project.