BT’s strategy looks both smaller and bigger at the same time. On the face of it, it is counter-intuitive, and hardly makes sense: to sell off entire foreign operations and assets – data centres, local leased lines, private WANs, offices, operations centres – and yet still talk like a global player. Its sale of BT Federal, its US government contracting business, is another marker in the ground – following similar retreats in Italy, Ireland, France, Spain. Meanwhile, it is couching everything in a UK-first, or UK-centric, strategy.

And yet there is smart logic, here – where it will pivot around these exit-markers. Because global scale does not require global ownership, of course. BT purports to be keeping its profitable service portfolios while shedding its cap-ex intensive infrastructure – and sharpening up at home, and offering multi-cloud comms elsewhere. Its Global Fabric platform is software-defined, AI-driven, and cloud-agnostic. So the story goes. It seeks to stitch together local and regional networks without owning them.

So the paradox then, like so much in the cloud era, is that BT can claim global reach, even if it is only in the shadows – by controlling the intelligence layer over networks and clouds. The proof will be in its customer books, and its bottom-line enterprise service subscriptions. Watching with interest.