By Jo Best, 4 September 2006 13:15
NEWS
BT is gearing up to shift some of its existing customers on to its brand spanking new all-IP network, known as the 21CN.
The first customers to make the change, all located in the Cardiff area, will be swapped to the 21CN over the course of the next 12 months.
The first phase of the project will see 10 per cent of lines upgraded before March next year, with another 10 per cent getting an update before May 2007. The initial phase will take in areas around the Cynnon, Rhonda and Rhymney valleys as well as some of the Vale of Glamorgan. The second will cover parts of Cardiff and Penarth.
By the end of the summer the telco is promising to have all 350,000 lines in the region on the next generation network.
According to a BT spokesman, customers should experience a "fairly seamless" changeover from the old network to the 21CN. "There will be short outages for each person but the likelihood is that will take place at night when people are asleep," he said.
After the dust has settled on the Cardiff migration, BT and other communications companies will conduct a review before the nationwide changeover takes place, scheduled to commence from early 2008.
BT expects to have the rest of the UK's 30 million lines on the 21CN by the end of the decade.
In October, BT will start giving more details on this rollout. Large corporate customers will be contacted by their communications provider who will talk through the changeover with them and check all equipment is compatible with the next-gen network.
BT's spokesman said: "For consumers and single site SMEs, it's just not possible to contact 20 million people." Instead, BT and fellow telcos are working on a communications plan to let them know about the changeover and when they can expect to be upgraded - including the creation of a new website and a single point of contact for all queries, regardless of provider.
Comments
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1. Charles Smith
"Fairly Seamless" - ROFL
Having experienced BT's incompetence with a recent PSTN to LLU conversion for an ADSL service I would not hold out too strong a hope of being able to call people in Cardiff for a couple of months during their 21CN conversion.
In my experience it is an organisation where half the staff are dedicated to resolving the problems caused caused by the other half.
If BT care to contact me I can give them a pre-prepared list, on an A4 sheet, of standard excuses to trot out.
2. Roger Huffadine
As soon as BT announced the name 21CN I looked on the internet for unused 21CN domain names - now given that the network is going to be able to stream TV you would expect their marketing department to have nailed down the 21CN.TV domain - nah too slow so now I'm just waiting for them to wake up and want it - and I'm not going to fall foul of the silly commercial use judgement that BT won over some poor domain holder a few years ago - I shall just sit on it until they want it - if ever - and then they can pay me 12 months worth of the salary of the nitwit who didn't bag the name in the first place. (Ed note. Good luck with that. A read through Icann's dispute guidelines would probably be a good idea.)
3. Russ Lewis
Which decade?
".. to be completed by the end of the decade."
If it's taken BT until now to realize that we're in the 21st century, I wonder if they had any particular decade in mind.
(Only kidding, guys - you're much better than you used to be ....)