Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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."
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"?
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.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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.
do people in britain (and other countries) suffer from the RIM syndrome? ie being on a remote integrated multiplexor? or even being pairgained? If its common over there, does that mean BT will be ugprading all their exchanges?
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
Does this mean we can look forward to delay effects normally associated with international calls when making local calls?
You can bet their charging scheme will change to p/minute to p/MB of data. That way they can cash in on all the "free" telephony.
"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
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.
Forgive me if I don't get the technology right here.
We don't remember IP address for websites at the moment. We use DNS. Would the same not be true for your example?
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Well, everyone will just register a .phone domain for themselves, so you can just call them by name.
God help you if you're John Smith!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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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ZombieEngineer
Over time there's the possibility of moving towards other IDs such as domain names or what have you. Raw IPs aren't likely to ever be visible to anyone but the nerds.
Phone service to the UK is temporatily unavailable due to the Sasser.Q virus. Please try again later.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
From what I understand, currently phones work when there's a power outage because the current copper line network always has a mild voltage in it.. Just wondering if that will change if the phones are connected via a fibre network..
When Skype come out with their telephone kit that plugs straight into the new BT network will BT cut off people trying to use another handset? They might, but they wont get away with it.
This is going to be the biggest revolution in telephony the UK has ever seen. Whilst a Skype handset might not connect you to phones that are not on their network, if enough people use it, it could supplant the BT network and destroy their business.
I wonder how they are going to charge for the service, obviously line rental, which will be the minimum they will be able to collect from each user, but taking into consideration the ease with which people will be able to switch providers, their churn rate will be very high indeed.
Basically, they are going to spend 3 billion to put themselvs out of business. Great!
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
You remember surely.... and I would like to see the telegram - only in designated sub post offices on a Wednesday afternoon. Does VOIP mean I'll have to convey my lusty conversations via Deepak in Delhi with that lovely poor quality distortion that I'm at a loss to describe. "Dear, he is saying that he is - weooooeeoosd - with you"
If I promise to be a good boy can I have some better karma?
The backend is going to be IP based you fool. So we'll still have telephone numbers etc, but BT will route all of the call data via IP. So, basically, they'll reduce the already tiny operating costs even more, whilst attempting to bump up the cost of xDSL even further. They'll probably argue along the lines of "Mr X uses much more bandwidth now so we have to charge more". The excess bandwidth being Mr X's telephone calls, which he is already paying for.
Those without any experience of BT, especially as business customers should know that 2026 will be the more likely date. It is still a glacially slow behemoth that acts with sniffy surprise when expected permit competition in the marketplace.
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.
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.
My concern was less over the form of the number than its size.
I had read that companies in the states gave out 10 digit phone numbers to their VOIP customers.
May the Maths Be with you!
Yes old chum. Try taking The Times for a few weeks, you'll soon understand what the Empire is about.
If I promise to be a good boy can I have some better karma?
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.
Yes, it is British Telecom. Originally it was public owned and was the only telco in the UK with the exception of Kingston Communications, a Hull City coucil run telco only available to the residents of Kingston Upon Hull. B.T was then privatised. It is the largest Telco in the UK. With the exception of a few cable companies operating in limited areas and Kingston Communications, B.T still owns most of the telephone exchanges in the UK and if you want to provide a DSL/Phone service you have to do it over their lines.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
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".
I had read that companies in the states gave out 10 digit phone numbers to their VOIP customers.
I (along with the rest of my company) use VoIP phones. We all have 7 digit direct dial numbers. If someone from outside the local area code wants to call, of course they must use 10 digits.
The exceptions are in some major metro areas, like Denver, CO. There, all dialing, both local and long distance, is 10 digit, both PSTN and VoIP.
bash: rtfm: command not found
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.
consider the expense to (and outcry from!) local businesses if they all had to change their signs, business cards, advertisments, ...
Hah! You'd be shocked at how often the numbers do change here. Nearly fifteen years ago the area codes for London were split into two. Then about ten years ago all of the area codes changed, and some areas got brand new area codes. The London codes changed again. Then a couple of years ago the codes changed again for some areas, and instead of every U.K area code starting with 01, they added 02xx codes as well. London changed again.
Area codes in the U.K are a fucking pain in the ass, and doubly so if you live in London. I thought the old system of 01xxx was fine, and made a lot of sense, but then they decided that 999 possible area codes in the 01xxx range wasn't enough and they needed an extra 999 codes in the 02xxx range, and just in case the 03xxx range is reserved for yet more area codes. Should the United Kingdom ever require 2,997 area codes I guess we'll be glad, but I can't see it happening somehow.
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!
The Internet Protocol was originally designed for non realtime applications. In the last few decades it has been shoehorned into various realtime applications , IP telephony being one, online games being another. And it sort of works. But not very well without a HELL of a lot of high end hardware to help it along. Some things are best left to propriatary protocols , they do one thing and they do it well. Speech is one of these things that would be better served with one of these (and in fact a lot are used). I simply don't understand this headlong rush into using IP for everything , its a general purpose protocol for sure but this means its a jack of all trades master of none. Isn't it time that companies who should know what they are doing ignore all the hype and bandwagons with fairly flat tyres from the startups desperate to flog VOIP to stay afloat and use their expertese to design something for the 21st century , not use an overworked protocol from the 1970s?
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.
It really is a nice idea, but the concept of BT managing to do anything in a timely (or even successful) manner is entirely incomprehensable.
It took them ten years to get to the current stage of broadband, and that hardly involved much work. This won't be completed until around 2099.
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.
It's worth pointing out that this may not be a done deal.
In the UK the telecoms industry has until recently been regulated by an organisation called Oftel. They have recently been replaced by a much broader regulator called Ofcom (http://www.ofcom.org.uk/).
Their job is to try and ensure that the communications industry as a whole remains competitive. Which generally involves keeping BT on a short leash.
This is the first major announcement from BT since Ofcom came into existence, so they may want attempt to use this as an opportunity to stamp their authority on BT. Though if Oftel is anything to go by they'll probably be BT's lapdogs..
No way there are enough IPv4 adresses for this. Perhaps BT can get enough addresses, meybe even the next telco who tries to do this, but globally this is not a solution.
Now if they used IPv6... perhaps this will be the "killer app" for IPv6?
They also say that current cheap broadband products will more than likely not be viable in five years time
BT have cheap broadband products? Yikes, they've kept that well hidden!
BT == Bloody Tyrants
(or something more unpleasant)
My phone line from BT has a fault that causes POTS modems connected to it to die after 2-3 months service.
Slightly cheesed that BT was nuking my (BABT/BT approved) modems, I ring up their fault helpline and complain. The response: "BT is not required to provide a telephone line fit for data-communications to residential customers." WTF? They will still sell you internet access, but apparently they don't have to provide it!
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I'm from Austria ;-)
Actually I realized it is the British Telecom, I just wanted to point out that not everyone in the world might know what BT stands for...
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?
I expect that they will be using MPLS technology. This would allow them to tag voice traffic and improve its QoS.
This will, of course, only work on networks that they run, so expect poor QoS if you have to make calls that cross networks, such as international calls.
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!
I work for BT and have known about this for a few weeks now, seems like a move in the right direction
;)
1000 people will have it tested in the south of England in 2005 I belive
Now they just have to start offering good internet and phone products to win customers back
BT (British Telecom) used to be a public subsiduary of the British post office (I believe). However, despite the fact it is its own company, it is *heavily* regulated by Ofcom, the telecom regulator. Basicly, about 90% of UK broadband providers provide ADSL (Asymectrical DSL - meaning faster Dl that Ul) from BTs network. This wasn't the case but Ofcom forced BT to allow other networks to run on the network at low cost, and also forced BT to allow very cheap rates for commercial isps to offer unlimited 56k dialup. Whatever network BT develop will be available to all comers, no matter which company, and this is assured by both UK monopoly law and Ofcom. However, I think the benefits for the UK will be huge, and everyone should benefit from that, not just BT. Think about it, a fibre based network running over the entire country, and if you RTFA you will see they are talking about linking in wit the 3rd generation mobile phone network (already IP based obviously), meaning you could have a single number for mobile, internet and "standard" phone. I think this has been in BT's pipeline for a long time, and I personally think it will be a good thing, provided Ofcom keep up to their end of the bargain. Oh, one thing though. Will it be encrypted, or will it be "tap friendly"?
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http://josephfarthing.com
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.
Duh.
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...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.
Yep... until you start getting spam bots searching for your webphone... then you will need a spamphoneassasin type thing.. whole can of worms.
You haven't looked up how much bandwidth voip uses, have you? For example, ventrilo, one popular voip app, uses about 6k/sec when talking, but ~0 when there's no talk. Acheived courtesy of the GSM codec. Or 0 when it's not connected. You don't sit on the phone 24/7 do you? If so, I'd suspect that you are allready paying quite a lot.
Connect up a fax machine - if that blows up, then you can get somewhere as BT need to provide at least a 4800 or 9600 bps (can't remember which) fax connection can be established.
I assume the acronym means "what the fuck are you bleating on about".
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
British Telecom, or Bloody Typical if you've ever had to deal with their customer support.
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
"Joe Bloggs" only use around 6k/sec on their xDSL connection, so overall an average line will see an 15-20% increase in usage.
Though around the time the network is rolled out Video On Demand may be mass market, which would reduce that a lot - but BT do mention videoconferencing in addition to vanilla calls...
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.
Quoth the poster: "They also say that current cheap broadband products will more than likely not be viable in five years time."
This means:
"Mr Beal hinted, however, that the cheap broadband telephony deals available at the moment may not continue." (from bbc article).
NOT that broadband itself is going to get more expensive...
Posters recognized by their sig,
Uh, you're post is complete and utter rubbish. STD (area) codes have always been specific to an area, dependent on where you're calling and never where you're calling from.
The reason why people would give out the name of the area that they lived in is that, back in the days when the system was set up when overlaying the alphabet onto the digits 0-9 had more significance in the UK, part of the name would correspond to the area code. In fact, the area codes themselves derived from the place names.
This area coding was taken so seriously that in some instances people wrote to the Post Office (because that's who ran the telephone system back then) to demand that their area codes were changed so that the numbers corresponded to more affluent places. For example, people living in the suburb of Anytown would rather have an area code refering to the posher neighbouring suburb of Sometown, so they'd petition for that area code to apply to them too. In many instances, because people in Anytown were reluctant to have a phone installed and answer the phone "Anytown 1212" (or whatever their number was) this held up uptake of telephony services to the point where the Post Office acquiesced and gave people the Sometown area code (or a derivation of it) that they wanted.
I learnt all this almost 15 years ago from a BT engineer of 20 years experience. Ask any older BT engineer and they'll confirm this for you.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Right now, phones pay for broadband.
Once the public gets seriously into VOIP, which they will, phones are going byebye. So broadband will have to pay for itself.
Only sensible, really.
Bittorrent going into telephony?
I want to participate..
Where's the link to the seed?
- Voice of Ambience -
And there was me thinking that the original poster just hadn't updated from the Good Old Days of the GPO!
(GPO = General Post Office, the fore-runner of British Telecom and the Royal Mail. Factoid: Tommy Flowers, the engineer who built Colossus, was a GPO employee)
This is where the serious fun begins.
[I posted this to the other VoIP thread, but it is a useful tool]
You can simulate a VoIP call and get the MOS voice quality score. So if you want to see how your Wireless setup fares, visit testyourvoip.com.
Even if you don't care about VoIP, it is a useful test of the latency and bandwidth of your connection. VoIP is pretty sensitive to late packets so this tool highlights connectivity problems.
-ben
although anything with a picture of President Blair on it is probably a serious threat now I think about it...
Would that allude to the lack of Tony Blairs photo and signature on the Labour EU campaign leaflets... not that he is a liability or anything (mind with the government 'spin' they'd still come up with an excuse for that one).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Arent BT one of the largest telco's in the world? They merged with some US telco a good few years ago didnt they? MCI or somesuch, i cant remember.
And have bought various other smaller telco's around the world. Eg, British Telecom are the only other telco providing local-loop in Ireland other than the former state-owned monopoly, Errorcon^WEircom, by virtue of having bought Esat (former irish telco, now owned by BT obviously. Called EsatBT - but no doubt name will change fully over to BT in time).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
BT will spend around 3bn on the project - more than the annual spend on Britain's main roads
By about 2.9bn judging from our motorways
Nothing costs nothing
I think that (from the Slashdot submission), it must not be British Telecom. See:
Clearly, whatever BT that we're talking about here happens to be a plural entity, whereas British Telecom is a single company (and should use the sinuglar "is" rather than "are"). So, maybe it's "British Twits" who are planning on using VOIP, or "Boring Tarts" or even "Big Testicles", but surely not "British Telecom".
Apparently, no matter how successful the fibre trials are, only new builds or big business will get fibre from the exchange. No good for 99% of the population....
But a 3 Billion pound scheme per year for 3/4 years.. making a total of about 10 billion (or 18/19 billion USD)
Im having trouble remembering peoples seven digit numbers. What happens when your telephone number is . . . IPv6!!
Prediction: most of us will live to see the death of the phone number in general usage.
The notion that a person should have to remember an almost-random 10-digit string of numbers to speak to the person they wish to speak to is merely a relic of old, limited technology. It is a relic that will go away. Why should the system not handle tracking down and locating our recipient for us?
Cellular networks now locate recipient's cell phones when the recipient is travelling and route the call. Many phones and some cellular company central systems now use limited amounts of voice recognition. DNS now translates names to numbers. This change will come in our lifetimes. Phone numbers will be regarded as a crutch between the era of human operators placing all calls and the era of "Computer, where is Mr. Riker?"
At present, I know of no comprehensive effort to do this, but the necessary technologies are quickly falling into place. Sure, there are problems like disambiguation, but they aren't unsolvable.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
... and their stupid encoding for € (and slashcode for not TALKING and UNDERSTANDING UTF-8 properly, the way things should be)
damn, damn
When I read the headline, I thought it was this BT. Can you say music production nerd? This isn't the first time this has happened to me with the BT's. Especially on this site.
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.
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!
In England?!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Gateways on the networks are no big deal, but I have been very impressed by how TCP/IP has become a generic way of networking. Even to Mars I gather.
However, few of us have relatives on Mars, yet.
Do you think this change in back end hardware is going to be actually just the internet ?
Dont Be so secular,
Telcos can pull voip off be cause they control all the boxes, wires and protocols in the system. Mrs smith will use her old telephone into an A/D converter at the exchange, quite a lot like it is now!
Do you all honestly think that the BT network still has clacker board relays to connect your call?
I don't think they will get it done smoothly simply because they are a big clunky organisation, not because it cant be done.
Besides all that, someone has to buy those BFG Cisco routers dont they!
BT Exact offers a free IPv6 tunnel-broker service which I've found useful, so yes, I think they probably will use IPv6 internally.
But it's British Telecom, so 'are' is correct. Use of 'is' is an American thing.
Maybe you're joking and I don't get it....
I just don't understand this. As far as I know, the British conjugate the verb "to be" the same way we do here in the states: I am, you are, he is, she is, is is, we are, they are. So a single entity (like British Telecom) should be conjugated as "is". Do brits really use "are" in this case"? Why?