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."

Comments

The IT Parallel

[neonprimetime]

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.

There is a parallel here to the IT world ... and I'll give you a hint: Microsoft would make a great big phone company.

on BT...

[joe 155]

...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

Re:on BT...

[thePig]

I am not too sure.
VOIP shouldnt have any say in this.
VOIP is primarily bearer channel, while for providing services etc, the signalling channel is what is important.

But it is true that signalling protocols are also changing for the better.
Instead of the TDM based ISUP etc, the movement is towards SIP, which should help.

Mind you, this is not a new thing. SIP was completely ready by 2000 itself. Only that it is now everybody is moving towards it.

Of course it is

[Robotech_Master]

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...

Re:Of course it is

[Mercano]

Well, they were refuling off the temporal rift left over from a previous (by ~9 episodes or ~125 years) visit.

Back on our rather mundane version of Earth, the show is filmed in Cardif, as is Torchwood, the upcoming spinoff, which also takes place there.

Other way ?

[earthstar]

the phone has the potential to become more like the Internet

Is it not the other way ?
Infact ,

(British Telecom) the incumbent phone company in the United Kingdom, is planning to shut off all of its legacy phone networks - a hodge podge of systems that includes the traditional "circuit switched" system that has served as the architecture for delivering phone calls for more than a century - by 2010

This is good?

[tverbeek]

"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....

Re:Whales have telephones?

[mmarlett]

No, no ... it's not the whales. It's the people they eat. It's very hard to get reception inside a whale, and therefore very difficult to get help when a whale eats you. In old days, they had to light a fire and hope that a passing ship could see the smoke -- now we'll be able to send pictures of the ribcage and everything. Come on, man, RTFA.

Blimey...

[Clazzy]

I never expected sheep and mountains to be the future of telecom. Scientists nowadays, eh?

Re:Blimey...

[dr_dank]

leaps into the room in red garb

NOBODY expects the sheep and mountains!

Oh no you don't BT!

[drspliff]

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.

"This is no small thing. 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 virtually impossible for some entrepreneur in a garage or some teenager tinkering at his computer to develop a new phone service."

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.

Re:Oh no you don't BT!

[gpuk]

BT is a huge corporation. You need to make a distinction between their various retail arms and their network/infrastructure arm.

BT retail is appaulingly bad and the criticisms you make are all valid.

However, the network/infrastructure arm of BT is among the best in the world.

Thanks to BT:
1). The UK enjoys 99% ADSL coverage
2). The UK has the deapest ADSL penetration in Europe (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/03/broadband _france_uk/)
3). Thanks to the recent successfull rollout of MAX DSL you can now get up to 8MB down and 480KB up
4). We have some of the most competative ADSL pricing in Europe
5). There are a huge array of different ISPs and packages available on the market (http://www.adslguide.org.uk)
6). They are no longer a monoply which is why you can get ADSL for GBP£10/mnth or you can get ADSL for GBP £70 month depending on what you want and who you want to provide it.
7). We are approaching over 500,000 unbundled lines (LLU) which puts us second place in Europe for LLU

The Cardiff initiative is nothing to do with BT Retail. It is BT's next generation infrastructure trial and from what I have read this new platform will ensure the underlying BT network remains one of the most advanced and reliable in the world, with all the benefits this will bring.

Re:Writing Applications in BT?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Uh, that's British Telecom.

Pot Noodles

[Anne Thwacks]

At least it will create work for all those redundant pot noodle miners.

Notable people

[Rob T Firefly]

The measure is primarily backed by a Mr. Jonah and a Mr. Ahab, two men who claim lots of experience with Wales.

It's all just data. Content should be king.

[stunt_penguin]

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.

Wales - a country where people live

[epa]

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

Re:Wales - a country where people live

[dugjohnson]

It's not the lack of education, but the love of the pun that is offensive, but not particularly rare, unfortunately. A lot of us Americans know about Wales, and where it is, and la la la. Welsh Corgis, Welshmen taking a leek, Welsh's grape juice (Ok, sorry).
Unbunch thy panties, we make fun of ourselves too.

Re:Wales - a country where people live

[dugjohnson]

How is Whales vs. Wales racist?
And as a Polish American I have heard and told my fair share of Polack jokes.
Your response makes my point perfectly. Nobody said ANYTHING bad about the Welsh. Yet you are offended. Your panties are, indeed, in a bunch.

Oh great!

[tweek]

Wasn't Blaidd Drwg enough of a warning?

What, are they going to call it "Raxacoricofallapatorian Telecom"?