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."

Whales have telephones?

They must use hands free headsets. Damn, I knew whales were smart, but this is amazing.

The IT Parallel

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...

...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

Of course it is

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...

Other way ?

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

Won't be open because of stupid laws

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.

This is good?

"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....

What are they changing?

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 [wikipedia.org] or CAMEL [wikipedia.org] ??
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 [wikipedia.org] using the new platform.

This is probably the last big battle

This is the last big battle to control the ones and zeros that enter your house.

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....

Blimey...

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

Oh no you don't BT!

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.

Pot Noodles

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

Doubts

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.

Notable people

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

Nice PR, but let's see it happen...

It's one thing to tout the capabilities of a future system, and it's quite another to put it into practice and deliver the goods. I'm reading a book called "Making Change Stick", by Richard C. Reale, and wanted to quote a couple of sentence from it, which apply nicely to this:

"The key question is, why does change so often fail to stick? On closer examination perhaps it's not that we regressed but rather that the change was more illusion than reality. We painted a few eggs gold in the expectation that the goose would be inspired, get the picture, and start laying golden ones. The elements necessary to accomplish and sustain the change were neither identified nor implemented."

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.

Old News

Check out: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/22/bt_21cn_re ynolds/ [theregister.co.uk] and http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/communications/networks /0,39020427,39220184,00.htm [zdnet.co.uk]

And there's been plenty more discussion about this online and in the UK media. Probably been posted or commented on here too...

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

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.

Really looking forward to

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.

New applications for phones

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

Oh great!

Wasn't Blaidd Drwg enough of a warning?

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

Why?

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.

IP4 or IP6?

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?

Re:Writing Applications in BT?

Uh, that's British Telecom.

Re:Whales

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 [slashdot.org]). 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!

Re:tags

Sounds like someone needs a cookie.

Re:Slashdot:

Shut your goddamn mouth. All hail Commander Taco!

Re:Whales

Of course it is? Why else would lunar whales [gotfuturama.com] 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.

Re:Writing Applications in BT?

I was actually tempted to mod the parent funny :)