With its pioneering strategy, shiny new network, innovative fixed-mobile hybrid offering and booming services arm, BT is no longer the lumbering dinosaur it once was. But somebody seems to have forgotten to tell its 22m retail customers. Why the disconnect? Mr Verwaayen likes to think the problems are to do with the company's history, rather than its defects today: “BT is the company of Grandma's telephone in the hallway,” he says. “You have to ask if you can use it, and you have to keep the calls short. It is very hard for people to change that institutional memory.”