"For Comcast the issue is about sending a message of decisiveness to investors," said François Godard, senior media and telecoms analyst at Enders Analysis, adding that Sky did not have enough scale to compete in the German market.

"ProSieben and their Joyn platform could be the solution," he said.

Twitter Blue to the rescue? In the three months since the $8 per month subscription launched, only 300,000 users have registered, generating a mere $28 million in revenue, according to Enders Analysis. On the horizon is an ad free Twitter Blue (cost to be confirmed) and a gold verification for organisations at $1,000 per month. Neither have generated any revenue to date. But Musk’s masterplan is to turn Twitter into a Chinese-style super-app under the holding company “X Corp” offering messaging, payments and entertainment. But according to Joseph Teasdale, Enders’s head of technology, “it’s a pipe dream”. Twitter has neither the regulatory environment nor demographics which underpinned the success of the Chinese apps that Musk wishes to emulate. He needs the advertisers.

Joseph Teasdale, head of technology at Enders Analysis, says some of the problems faced by the digital darlings during that formative time (the terrible technological teen years) were that they remained “good pitches still looking for a business plan”. Investors will happily splurge cash on the hope of future success, but only for a finite amount of time.

James Barford, head of telecoms research at Enders Analysis, said the BT job cuts were mostly about fewer people being needed in building networks, whereas the Vodafone cuts were "more general efficiency savings".

He said that in both cases plans were "already broadly in place, with savings previously described in monetary terms rather than headcount reduction".

Possibly, the firms are now talking about job cuts "to help convince sceptical investors that they will actually deliver the promised savings", Mr Barford added.

Alice Enders, a music industry expert at the consultancy Enders Analysis, said Masuch was a legend in the music industry whose “shoes may be hard to fill”. But she said that, as a former CFO, Coesfeld understood the business “extremely well”. She described him as a “good choice” to continue the “sound financial management” at BMG.

Yaccarino “has the right credentials” to reassure large advertisers, says Joseph Teasdale, head of technology at Enders Analysis. He adds that Musk “may well be sick of running Twitter” and hiring a new CEO will allow him to turn his attention elsewhere.

But “the risk is Musk, as the majority owner, will be as unpredictable and interventionist as he has been as CEO.”

Karen Egan, senior telecoms analyst and head of mobile for Enders Analysis, has heard this all before: “I’m ready to be convinced by the turnaround but I and investors have been burnt by all the right promises at all the right times and then not being delivered on before. So no matter what she announced there will be scepticism around it until changes happen and gain momentum.”

Karen Egan, head of mobile at Enders Analysis, says: “There’s a real question mark about where Vodafone adds value here, or does it detract value? The very essence of why Vodafone exists has to be called into question now.”

She added “People have been burned. There have been many promises of a turnaround, but it just didn’t come to fruition.”

“The concern here is this sounds a lot like another one of Nick Read’s promises,” says Egan. “It needs to sound like there’s more conviction and more urgency behind it.”

“Keeping the whole group together suits them,” says Egan. “I think that the likelihood of any of the individual markets being sold off to private equity will not appeal to e& but may be in the best interests of shareholders.”

“It’s sufficiently differentiated relative to the series of plans that the former CEO had in place. It is somewhat more aggressive and there is more recognition of the failings of the previous approach, so there is hope,” said Karen Egan, an analyst at Enders Analysis. But she added: “We have had many false dawns in Germany — as well as Italy and Spain — so a new promise to turn things around is going to be met with a degree of scepticism.”