BT Group PLC (BT:NYSE)

BT Group plc reiterated plans to shed a further 15,000 workers in 2009.

BT Group plc announced plans to expand its rollout of fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) broadband services. The company said that it is commercially ahead of its targets in all aspects of its previously announced expansion plans and can therefore expand the FTTP program beyond the original limits to include properties already supplied via copper cable. Previous plans for FTTP deployment only included new build properties. The new announcement means that an additional one million premises will have access to the 100MB/s service by 2012, with other premises being supplied via 40Mb/s Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) services. The total cost of the company's plans amount to an investment of some £1.5 billion, including the recently confirmed plans to make faster copper broadband services (up to 24Mb/s) available to 75% of UK homes. The company's Openreach division recently announced plans to trial a brownfield rollout of FTTP broadband in an area of Milton Keynes, with deployment to be completed by March 2010 to 20,000 homes and businesses.

BT announced that ELX Futures, L.P. (ELX Futures), a new fully electronic futures exchange, has connected to the BT service known as the BT Radianz Shared Market Infrastructure to provide its participants with the ability to connect to its trade matching engines. ELX Futures joins over 60 other exchanges, ECNs (Electronic Communications Networks) and MTFs (Multilateral Trading Facilities) that are already connected to BT's dedicated financial services network.