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The Future of Telecom is in Wales
An anonymous reader wrote to mention a CNN Money story about the future of U.K. telecommunications. British Telecom is planning on rolling out an $18 Billion new system in 2010, and the first location to get the hook up is Cardiff, in Wales. From the article: "What's really cool about what will happen in Cardiff - and eventually the rest of the U.K. - is that BT is creating an open, standards-based platform for which anyone can develop new applications. In other words, the phone has the potential to become more like the Internet with its proliferation of cool new Web sites, tools and services."
They must use hands free headsets. Damn, I knew whales were smart, but this is amazing.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Asked to speculate on why other big phone companies have been reluctant to embrace open standards, Reynolds demurs, but suggests that openness makes BT's strategy less risky, not more. "You get more people's intellectual capital," he says.
... and I'll give you a hint: Microsoft would make a great big phone company.
There is a parallel here to the IT world
...My mum's husband works for BT as some kind of manager/organiser; he was telling me that they had been at a team meeting about a year ago where they were looking at replacing the current phone system with ultra high band VOIP. They were also taking about putting television content down the line as well... I don't know when they were thinking of trying to get this sytem out but it sounded interesting
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
The future of everything is in Cardiff, really. And so is the past. All bundled up in a police box with a flashing blue light on the top...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Is it not the other way ? ,
Infact
Why does yahoo do this
This will not be an open system because of the stupid laws that have been passed in the UK. As soon as someone attempts to use the system for something innovative or query the system they will be charged with a computer crime.
"the phone has the potential to become more like the Internet with its proliferation of cool new Web sites, tools and services."
...spam, phishing, viruses, DDOS, adverts....
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Why go through all the hassle of developing applications in BitTorrent when you can just download them like a normal person?
From the article
Right now, for example, most of the mildly interesting stuff consumers can do with their phones - call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding - is programmed right into the big computers that route calls around the network. That makes it impossible for some some teenager tinkering at his computer to develop a new phone service.
Not exactly.
Heard about IN or CAMEL ??
These were all designed as a way to take the power out from switches and provide a database which can be used by small switches.
Using IN/CAMEL, it is very easy to provide/handle ANY service.
And what I want to see is how they are going to provide Lawful Intercept using the new platform.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
In the very near future there will be one pipe that pump all the bits into and out of your house, be it video, phone, audio, internet or just your house alarm.
And I bet the conduit will not be a couple of copper wires. Telephone, you are so 19th century....
I never expected sheep and mountains to be the future of telecom. Scientists nowadays, eh?
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
There's a problem here, we already have an open standards based telephony standard, that allows custom application developers and users to customize their telephones.
While on the other hand, with SIP and IAX you can do whatever you want.. today! As we speak I have an Asterisk server with a Cepstral auto attendant connected to a PSTN gateway.. Voicemail. call forwarding, location tracking (e.g. at lunch it directs calls to my mobile/cell phone).
Knowing BT's history with pricing and service quality I'd stay fairly clear from this. (For the record, BT's customer support and internet services are appallingly bad, and compared to existing SIP to PSTN or even Skype their international calling rates are very high).
BT's problems are deeply routed in the way they do business with their infrastructure services, to mention a few: price fixing and their 'modular' internal structure... In short it means everybody offers ADSL at the same price, apart from them.. and their Billing, Broadband, Dialup and Telephone departments seem to rely in pidgeons or paper cups on strings to communicate with each other!
Just my two pennies.
It is in whales. You may have heard about the bandwidth of pigeons a while back (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/ 31/2224227). Whales are even better. Not only do they have a vastly higher BPA (bytes per animal) than pigeons, but they can get your data to different continents!
It's the wave of the future!
At least it will create work for all those redundant pot noodle miners.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Somehow I doubt it will create a rival to the internet, but to see the telecoms companies finally upgrading the basic abilities of the phone is good, they have been complacent in the past and they were risking the whole market share of the phone (after the proliferation of mobiles and services such as Skype). Hopefully they will keep up this creativity and be rewarded for it by the consumers.
Business Voyeur
Sounds like someone needs a cookie.
The measure is primarily backed by a Mr. Jonah and a Mr. Ahab, two men who claim lots of experience with Wales.
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Or was that the Isle of Mann?
I seem to get a mental image of the Pony Express, with sheep..
I say it applies to this because I haven't heard many good things about BT over the years. On the contrary, I've heard they're stodgy and set in their ways. I'm curious to see how they're going to pull off something this big, and I wonder if it's not a a lot of hot air. But there's something to be said about a hungry workforce from an ex-coal town. They're hungry to work and be productive, so let's see if they can change something at BT.
ComeAcross -- You never know what you'll find.
Shut your goddamn mouth. All hail Commander Taco!
Check out: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/22/bt_21cn_re ynolds/ and http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/communications/networks /0,39020427,39220184,00.htm
And there's been plenty more discussion about this online and in the UK media. Probably been posted or commented on here too...
Free power from the line. ;)
I've been saying for a long time that the means by which data will go in and and out of our homes and businesses is going to just boil down to one means, and that'll either be a single copper or optical wire with a router at the end, or a dish that communucates with a mast a few miles away.
Living in Ireland at the moment , I've got a telephone line (which i'm soon dropping), cable internet, and a satellite TV dish all sending and receiving data at various times. They're all branded under different names etc- NTL, Sky, Eirom etc, but they;re all just doing the same thing. All these people are doing is selling me different ways of getting information in and out of here, and they're charging me a combined total of about 100 a month to do it, too.
The sooner someone can give me a line that will serve my internet, telephony and TV needs with one 50 a month connection the better.
It seems we pay so much for our data connections, and very little for the content. That missing 50 that would no longer be leaving my pocket for the shareholders of various telecoms every month would do very nicely in the pockets of content providers, whose channels I would be able to subscribe to and whose programmes would be downloaded to my hard disk while I sleep. Maybe then they'll be more content to let me watch their content without watching the commercials.
Anyway my bottom line is- simpler infrastructures means less money paying for various telecoms, and more money left over every month to pay for subscriptions and content.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Hi tech phones eh? Hmm..I can see it now: my home phone having an 8 megapixel camera so I can lift it up and take a picture of the postman as he drops off my mail, or maybe an artistic one of the shelf on the wall in the hallway.
AT&ROFLMAO
It is rare that I get annoyed to the point of being offended, but this thread has almost done it. For those (especially in North America) who lack education, Wales is a small western European country of about 3.5 million people. It is a semi-autonomous part of the United Kingdom. In the 1970s and 1980s, it suffered tremendously from loss of traditional industries, but that is the past. We have have a vibrant business environment that has encouraged centres for optical technology in St Asaph, software in Bangor and biotech in Swansea. Wales now has low unemployment, and has one of the largest manufacturing installations in Europe, in Airbus (Broughton, Flintshire). BT does not have much of an enthusiastic following in the UK. That is litotes! The Welsh Assembly Government has been central in even getting me ADSL, here in North Wales. Artificially confusing Wales with whales is really just racism. Just because we are a small country does not mean that we should be subject to snide quips. The comments I have read here are below the level I normally associate with slashdot. A
Time is life: speed saves it. LJK Setright
New applications for phones.....I could design a new application for a phone. I'd call it the somebody answers the phone facility. It works like this.......you phone a bank or a store or an IT support department and you press a magic button on the phone and somebody answers you. A real person that is...not a mindless message asking you to press a combination of buttons. Phil
The thing is, this is in Cardiff. London doesn't care. The South Wales coast could fall into the sea and they wouldn't notice. ;-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
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A. Lean Beef!
Q. What do you call a cow with no legs?
A. Ground Beef!
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A. Decaffeinated!
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- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
POTS have a new theme song:
"Bomb the Wales; Bomb The Wales
Drop the Big One on their.... umm.. Tales?"
Save the Music; Save the World at http://www.TuneTriever.com (Our latest Android game)
Wasn't Blaidd Drwg enough of a warning?
What, are they going to call it "Raxacoricofallapatorian Telecom"?
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
...collect-call marketing, phone fraud, slamming, robot calls, junk fax....
Of course it is? Why else would lunar whales be in such demand that they become extinct by the year 3000?
We're whalers on the moon,
We carry a harpoon.
But there ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing our whaling tune.
#include <signature.h>
...that British Rail (BR - as it was at the time) have a bigger telecoms network than BT (British Telecom). Something to do with train signals and cables down the side of every track. British Rail *does* have a telecoms license and thought about becoming an internet provider as they have *loads* of spare bandwidth (they're only controlling the signals and other low-bandwidth stuff)
;))
So - our train network has a better & bigger telecom network than our phone network - typically British! (Wouldn't surprise me that BT has more trains than BR
I was really confused by this article until I realized that we weren't talking about Jimbo.
Ym Cymru, ffôn arddel CHI!
Who says you can't learn taf with an online dictionary? (Cue angry taffs with correct translation and barrage of abuse).
Jeezo. Why can't we just have a system that just makes phonecalls? Why does everything have to be applicable? I want to be able to phone someone or have them phone me. I don't want to suffer from someone else's idea of an application.
What I'd say was more likely was that the Royal Mail owned more rolling stock than BR, and some other former monopoly delivers more letters, while being outperformed at their key task by BT.
That straight 1:1 thing isn't convoluted enough for a British system - what were you thinking?
Down the M4.
This'll probably only make sense to UK readers.
You do realise that NTL can already provide you with Telephone, TV and Internet service all down one line, right? :)
One would hope its IP6 but the article doesn't state this. Does anyone
happen to know.
Also will it be using the SCTP/IP protocol which was specifically
designed for telecoms or something they've rolled themselves on top
of IP?