Ex Ofcom UK Boss Stephen Carter Approached to Take BT CEO Role

The hunt for somebody to replace the outgoing CEO of BT Group, Gavin Patterson, appears to have reached fever pitch, with reports on Sky News that the former boss of telecoms regulator Ofcom, Stephen Carter (Lord Carter of Barnes), has been approach to take over the position. But there are other candidates too.

The Scottish businessman and politician would certainly be an interesting pick given his background in the industry. Between 2000 and 2003 Carter was the COO and MD of NTL (better known today as Virgin Media), before joining Ofcom to act as the regulator’s CEO until 2006 (around the period when Local Loop Unbundling was introduced).

After a brief stint as the CEO of Brunswick Group LLP he later joined the administration of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008, where he held various roles and also helped to author the Digital Britain report. This laid the foundations for the infamous 2010 Digital Economy Act, which is perhaps best known for encouraging better national broadband connectivity and attempting to impose some particularly harsh anti-piracy measures against UK ISP users (threats of disconnection etc.).

In April 2010 Carter moved on to become a Director of Alcatel-Lucent, where he held various other roles until leaving in 2013. Since then he’s been working as the CEO of information services company Informa. Suffice to say that Carter has a lot of experience in the sector, although he’s not the only person being considered to take the helm of BT.

Reports indicate that the former boss of mobile operator EE, Olaf Swantee, is another potential candidate and so is the CEO of Swedish operator Tele2, Alison Kirkby. Meanwhile a separate report on Yahoo! suggests that analysts have also pointed the finger more internally at BT’s CFO, Simon Lowth, and the boss of its consumer division, Marc Allera.

A new boss is expected to be appointed sometime during the second half of 2018 and whoever it is will have to contend with a particularly difficult climate, one where Openreach is being called upon to spend billions more on a national roll-out of “full fibre” (FTTP) broadband and adopt greater independence from BT.

At present the operator has already committed to reach 3 million premises passed with FTTP by the end of 2020 and they appear to be closing in on an agreement with Ofcom, which could enable them to push to 10 million premises by around 2025. We wouldn’t be at all surprised if a firm announcement on that ends up surfacing soon after the new CEO has been announced.