Re: Here's an idea
About year 2000 BT manglement decided that as that new-fangled mobile stuff didn't use wires it wasn't really anything to do with them so they merged Cellnet and BT Mobile, the customer facing business as O2 floated it as a separate company. Then Telefonica, who did grap the fact that mobiles were phones, bid for it and bought it.
Eventually a later BT management that realised mobile was an important aspect of telecoms discovered that they didn't have and player in the market. For a while they set up another business, also called BT Mobile, presumably to the amusement of any old BT Mobile hands still left in O2, to flog other people's services. The only way to fix this humiliating consequence of the depredations of their idiot predecessors was to buy EE which had been cobbled together out of bits of some of their previous competitors. To do this they had to use a substantial chunk of ptheir shares as payment to Deutsche Telekom.
I reckon that even by BT's appalling standards the original decision to get out of the mobile business was particularly egregious although it did justify the low opinion that those working in the original BT Mobile held of Big BT as it was known there.