Posted: Friday, 17 July 2015 @ 14:44
For the last 5 years BT has been continuing rolling out it's plan of transforming it's core network, an aging collection of different technologies bonded together which has been reffered to by BT as "Colussus" .
The estimated £10BN plan will see the BT retire 16 legacy networks and converged into one single "multi-service" network designed to carry it's customers voice and data traffic.
The benefit of which will be BT will be able to reduce costs of running and maintaining 16 legacy networks, improve quality of service, with the long term vision of replacing the existing Public Switched Telephone Network with Fibre/Ethernet to the premises.
So how does this affect you, the end user? Quite simply there will be no immediate effect on the access network, the connection from the premises to BT's local exchange or street cabinet. To date, BT has focussed on converting it's core network and enabling it's local exchanges.
The immediate benefit has been the offering of ADSL2+ a service that offers in theory up to 24Mb download and more recently BT's Infinity (VDSL) product, offering up to 40Mb download. Both of which still run over the existing copper cabble from your home or business. A fact that ever increasingly has seen ciminal activity increasing with thefts of copper becoming more prominent in the news.
BT, as a company is worth minus £30Bn. Despite the fact it is sittiling on billons in assets. The BT Network, relises on more than 75 million miles of copper cable, much of which can be found laid along rural roads.
Ten pairs of copper cabling weighs around 132KG per mile, which could lead us to estimate BT owns over 10 million tonnes of copper. At current trading prices, at over £5000 a tonne, it's a fact that has seen increasing theft of copper cabling, leaving homes and busineses without