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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."
This was the last thing I expected from BT after their faffing about with getting DSL sorted out a few years back. This should be interesting...
Too bad I'm not a BT customer. I wonder what will become of all of the mini-telcos which currently hang off BT's network.
Good Luck with that BT. There are tons of people out there with old rotary phones still, utilizing pulse dialing. They're not going to get some old lady to change her pots phone for some fancy IP phone.
Does anyone have an idea how all this phone traffic is going to affect the load on the entire internet? I assume it's UDP but stil... I have the feeling the backbone routers are busy enough already with all the other traffic
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
They work because the phone company has backup power - batteries and generators. See How Stuff Works.
However, you bring up an interesting point about fiber - unlike copper, you need to provide power for the devices on either end. From the article:
We anticipate that millions of people will use the phone in the same way...
This makes me think that the VOIP network may have copper wiring along the last mile, meaning it's very similar to how most phone companies are set up today. Nothing new to see here.
More on how the telephone network works (fascinating stuff) can be found here.
It fills me with dread to hear this news. I'm living in an area where BT have still not yet managed to install a DSL network. To hear that they've got more plans when they haven't even finished their old broadband roll out after god knows how many years seems plain stupid. It makes me angry.
This is a fairy tale dreamt up for investors, and you can expect within 2 years an announcement that it's all much harder than expected.
The UK phone network is not a simple beast, and not like any other phone network in the world. I suspect they're putting down the plan and hoping that they can start angling for some government "investment" to replace the absolute crud we have in place at the moment.
I would advise caution however, when BT announce anything at all. Remember this is the company who announced "universal" broadband 15 years ago and sat on the technology when it became available until they were effectively bullied into it.
The technology for this just isn't ready. The internet wasn't designed for having all these low-latency desiring services tacked onto it, and not everyone has a 50ms ping. What worries me about this is that the brits don't seem to have a choice in the matter, and are being shepherded into this under the guise of "new technology, newer is better".
The sad truth is the individual pieces work ok, but put the ISP, the routers, the voip boxes together, and you've got one hell of a mess.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
UK people already have 11 digit telephone numbers (more or less) so that would be an improvement!
I dont trust BT to make a success of this as they are total shite at dealing with internet technologies.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
I don't see the big deal about Skype, to me it just appears to be like any other Instant Messaging service, no? I can do exactly the same thing with MSN, although according to the site they say MSN's audio quality is lower.
However, as I said, it seems nothing more than another IM client, and you can bet your ass MS will go right ahead and implement a similar thing into Messenger.
"Dre don't get as high as me.... I'm Cheech and Chong" - Snoop Dogg
What I think would be interesting is if people who are familiar with the technology would explain how this changeover could be done in such a way as to have (a) the most negative impact on consumers and (b) the most unfairly anti-competitive impact on the telecoms industry.
Then in six years we can look back at this thread and see if that's how BT did it.
One of these would be extremely good for the UK and very forward thinking, the other would be investing money in a technology already straining to bursting point...
And on another note, how cool will it be to have links like <a href="phonecall:phone.mydomain.com">Phone Me!</a> on websites - how long until we have that I wonder?
The article briefly mentions converging land line and mobile services. Tie that in with recent articles about bluephone and BT OpenZone and things start to look very interesting for telephony in the uk!
Yes, and I *really, really* hope they have made provisions to switch to IPv6 or are doing everything on top of IPv6.
It would be a pain in the a** to update all the people's IP telephones from IPv4 to IPv6 (If it would be possible at all). And that would hamper the spread of IPv6 alot.
They are brave enough to switch to IP, hopefully they're also brave enough to switch to IPv6.
Indeed, that's what they say. However, as ip telephony can be expected to use a miniscule fraction of the bandwidth on a broadband connection, and IP telephony service isnt that expensive to set up, they'd have to figure out a way to lock you in, easiest by controlling and raising the price on your broadband as it would be much harder to control and overcharge for IP telephony service.
I think a lot of people including the press are missing the point here. The main thing here is not VoIP or fibre it is that BT are going to be migrating all of their services onto ONE IP network off of there existing PSTN, ATM and IP networks.
Obviously while this will eventually have implications for end users (BT are talking of a broadband dialtone) the main benefits will be a big cost saving for BT and the ability to quickly deploy new services onto the network.
BT seem to be gearing up for something, or reacting to something. Its strange for them to have such a flurry of activity as they have had of late, normally they are quite the epitome of corporate dawdling on products and issues.
Seems that they are wanting to seriously get themselves some press time, and in my opinion are using some clever marketing to do so.
Look at the ammount of new services / announcements / products they are kicking out the door at the moment listed on El Reg.
In my opinion, this is nothing short of marketing genius. Anyone who cries out against the obvious censorship issues risks being labelled. It pushes this kind of activity under ground. so who does this really protect? the only real benefit i see from this is accidental visiting of sites, from bad links, spam or whatever. It certainly wont stop any actual people wishing to view child pornography from getting to it.
BT have made an unprecedented movement to block this content, thereby championing themselves with many different groups of society (churches, parents, police, etc etc) - but the same fanfare that has delighted these groups has warned any of the sickos that actually want to view this content that they cant use BT services to get their kicks. OK then, so they go elsewhere. No one would continue to use a service they know can not suit their needs, as underground or sick as those needs may be, they will simply move to another provider that doesnt block in this way.
Marketing genius - Champion yourselves with lots of the country, by actually bringing little to no benefit to them or anyone else.
Then sharp on the heels of this announcement, tell the people who you have just delighted that you are going to be saving them a lot of money soon by changing the infrastructure of your network etc and routing your calls using VOIP. Thinking of leaving BT? They seem to be keen to impress and promise lots, all within a week. something strange is going on, i just cant figure out what, heh.