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BT Plans Move To IP Telephony, Starting Next Year
pure_equanimity writes "The BBC have published an article saying that BT are planning to migrate from a PSTN to an IP network, a move to cost 3bn. They say that broadband will become ubiquitous, with customers having the ability to plug any device in to get access. They also say that current cheap broadband products will more than likely not be viable in five years time. They plan to start rolling out in 2006, and cover the vast majority of customers by 2009."
I'll admit I had to look this one up, if ya woulda said POTS, I would of known right off the bat.
Public Switched Telephone Network btw.
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"cheap broadband products will more than likely not be viable in five years time"
:-)
BT don't do any cheap broadband products, only expensive overpriced ones
Most likely they'll continue to use phone numbers. It's too much of an investment to try to change the number system, and on top of that, it'd be much harder for a traditional telephone to call an IP number.
Basically, they're turning the voice data into packets and then sending the packets across their network, improving the effeciency of their lines. There's been a lot of discussion about this lately actually. Either way, I wish the american phone companies would get on the ball...
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Uncompressed telephone-qualtiy audio as PCM takes up 64 kbps (8 KB/s), just like an ISDN channel.
It will certainly not be as bad, load-wise, as installing high-speed Internet access.
All BT's exchanges have been System X (digital) for a few years now, but pulse-dialling still works in software, should you want it. The main reason some people still have dial phones is that they were hardwired to the wall, and it's an offence to get anyone but BT to install a modern plug-in wall box. At a cost.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I can only assume you mean DAC's? Where a cable is split into effectively 2 seperate lines (limiting your modem dialup to 28k, no matter what)
:(
Yes, they use it a lot here, but I dont think its an exchange limitation (generally anyway) - it seems to be more of a local box/cabling thing.. when we had an extra 3 lines put in the engineer said if we got 1 more, BT would have to upgrade the cable from the exchange to the subbox, then to our house! He also mumbled something about that probably helping them justify updating the exchange to DSL as well, but being students at the time, we couldnt afford the "chance" of DSL for the cost of another line
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This might help:
The public switched telephone network (PSTN) is the concatenation of the world's public circuit-switched telephone networks, in much the same way that the Internet is the concatenation of the world's public IP-based packet-switched networks. Originally a network of fixed-line analog telephone systems, the PSTN is now almost entirely digital, and now includes mobile as well as fixed telephones.
BT is BT. Sure, officially they are British Telecommunications plc, but it's not like you'd bother looking up what AT&T stood for, when all you needed to know was "it's a big telco".
That mild voltage is supplied by the central office via huge banks of batteries supplying a 48V DC feed.
Since a lot of COs and switching centers already have this massive infrastructure for supplying DC power most (if not all) internetworking equipment can be obtained in DC power supply versions.
So yes, the equipment at the CO will stay up through a power outage because it'll still be powered by those 48V batteries, equipment at the customer end is a completely different thing... but unless it's a full FTTH solution there are options for getting power to the CPE, like power over ethernet (if they use an ethernet last mile), and iirc there are power distribution solutions for coax if they decide to go that route.
So they are gonna hook customers up right before the prices go up? I thought prices would go down as time marches on? What about all that "dark fiber"?
Reading the article I took it to mean that cheap broadband IP telephony products would be unviable in 5 years time, not broadband internet per se.
the majority of BT users rent their phones for an annual cost that is far greater than buying one.. check out the House of Lords report. So it should be easy for BT to send them a new one, because they already own the rented one.
"They're not going to get some old lady to change her pots phone for some fancy IP phone"
Did you comprehend the article? This is more about their internal network, rather than the customer equipment.
They will convert their entire internal network into VOIP, so even if you have an old analog POTS line, your calls will be VOIP'd between exchanges.
Naturally, once they have a native internal VOIP network, then they're in a better position to offer interesting VOIP services directly to the customer. But a vast majority of customers will still be using analog POTS.
It's hardly surprising: if they don't do this then they will fall behind in offering the kinds of innovative services that upstart VOIP vendors can offer. It also makes for better service integration and interoperation with future 4G technologies, etc.
...they changed the trading name from British Telecom to 'BT' in 1991 and the corporate name to BT Group plc in 2000. You will find it hard to actually even find a reference to 'British Telecom' on bt.com.
No, BT provided the conversion for free. This cost them a lot of money and engineers time but the trade off was that they could then sell more equipment and digital services to those customers, and make the money back plus profit. They could have an engineer doing nowt but travelling an area doing socket conversions and make money still, no problems. But when there isn't enough conversions to be done, they start to loose money. The number of conversions is low and the number of extra services they could sell to those who were converting was small; the customers who found all those features useful had converted long ago. So BT were doing free conversions for customer from whom they couldn't make any significant revenue from. So they started to charge for the conversions.
Telecom Italia already carries 80% of its national backbone telephone calls on an IP based network infrastructure, and something like 40% of their international calls.
This is the back-end of the service, multiplexing together thousands of calls over high speed (2.5 and 10Gb/second) network links. The network also uses class of service and many other configuration setups to ensure a consistent quality of service for the traffic flow. You can be sure everything will be massively resilient. In addition this traffic won't traverse the public Internet at all, but will be on a private network (though gatewayed to the Internet for connectivity to other services). This will allow BT to guarantee they wont be hit by Internet related issues like congestion, black-hole routing and so on. Dont compare this service to public Internet VoIP, its NOTHING like it.
Personally I think this is a fantastic move, and will really help the UK take advantage of up and coming technologies over the next decade.
PS there is already an Internet standard to map IP addresses to public phone numbers, and there is also work on integrating VoIP into the DNS infrastructure!