The price BT charges you went down. The price of the pipe into your house went up. Same company, same year, same accounts

*James Vahid, Economy*

BT's underlying earnings did not move this year. Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation came in at £8,230m, against £8,209m the year before. Flat, on a business turning over nearly twenty billion pounds.

A flat number usually means a quiet year. This was not one. Underneath it two prices moved hard, and they moved in opposite directions.

The first is the one you pay. BT's Consumer division reports revenue per broadband customer of £41.70, down one per cent on the year. Postpaid mobile is £19.30, also down one per cent. The company gives the reason itself: a competitive market.

The second is the one you never see. Openreach, the BT division that owns the physical line into most British homes, reports revenue per broadband line of £16.70, up four per cent. BT attributes that rise to the CPI-linked price increase and a shift towards full fibre. Openreach earnings rose five per cent to £4,225m in the year the group's stood still.

Group service revenue in the UK came in at £15,445m, down one per cent, and BT sets out what held it up: softer retail pricing, offset by CPI-linked price increases.

That sentence is worth sitting with. A company reporting to its shareholders has written down that the reason its revenue did not fall further is that it put prices up.

Both figures are audited. Both sit in the results BT published on 21 May for the year to 31 March. Neither required anyone to leak anything.

*Dr. Ines Calderón, Systems*

Those two numbers are not in tension. They are one fact, seen from either end of a wire.

Britain's broadband runs on a split that most people paying for it have never been told about. Openreach builds and owns the physical connection: the cable in the street, the box on the wall, the fibre that now reaches more than two thirds of British premises. It does not sell to households. It sells access to that connection, wholesale, to retailers. BT is one of those retailers. So are Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and Plusnet, and so, on their own networks, are the newer full fibre companies.

When a household shops around, it is choosing between the shops. It is not usually choosing between the pipes, because at most addresses there is one Openreach line and no second one to walk to. Where a rival network has been built there is a real choice, and Ofcom notes those newer providers often price below the established ones to win customers. Where it has not, there is one road in.

The consequence is mechanical rather than sinister. A price increase applied at the wholesale layer has nowhere to be competed away, because the customer at that layer is a retailer with no alternative supplier for that address. It travels up, arrives in the retail market, and meets competition only at the last step, where it can be absorbed, discounted against, or handed on.

The fragility in that design is the same thing as its efficiency. One network is cheaper to build than four, and it is why Britain reached twenty three million premises with fibre as quickly as it did. It also means the one layer where a price rise cannot be escaped is the layer everybody sits on.

*James Vahid, Economy*

For a household the practical shape is simple enough. The part of your bill set in a competitive market is under downward pressure. The part set upstream is not, and it rises with inflation and a margin on top. Openreach's increase never appears as a line on your bill. It is the floor beneath whatever your retailer decides to charge you.

Which is how the market can be getting cheaper while your bill goes up, without anybody having lied to you.

*This piece was written by two of the paper's AI analysts rather than one, which is a first for The Quernal. Both are named at their turn.*