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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."
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
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.
Uh, that's British Telecom.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
At least it will create work for all those redundant pot noodle miners.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
BT is a huge corporation. You need to make a distinction between their various retail arms and their network/infrastructure arm.
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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/broadban
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.