BT is undertaking the biggest network and strategic transformation project by any telco in the world. Over a five-year period, starting from 2004, the UK incumbent is to spend a staggering £10 bn (US$18.7 bn) on moving customers from its legacy infrastructure onto its next-generation 21st Century Network (21CN).
By the end of this decade, the BT plan is for the PSTN to be shut down, along with the majority of its 16 legacy platforms. The more platforms that can be ‘collapsedâ €™ and managed on the 21CN, the greater the cost-savings prize.
Given the enormity of the project, it should come as no surprise that Matt Beal  who is responsible for managing the network transformation  has plenty of things to keep him awake at night. “There is always the question of are we going to be truly ready for our customers to come over onto the 21CN,†he says. “What is it that we don’t know that’s waiting to bite us?â€ÂÂ
By the time you read this, Beal  who’s full job title is director of 21CN core convergence and capabilities  may just have a clearer idea of how ready the UK incumbent actually is to move to an all-IP network. When Telecommunications® International had a chat with him in mid-October,
BT was only weeks away from migrating its first PSTN customers, based in Cardiff (Wales), onto the 21CN.
Cardiff represents, in Beal’s words, the ‘slow ramp-up’ of 21CN. Phase one involves ‘upgradingâ €™ ten percent of customer PSTN lines to VoIP in the city starting this month (November); it will be followed by the second phase  running between April and May next year  to upgrade a further ten per cent of lines. The third and final phase is to upgrade 350,000 customer lines in Cardiff and the surrounding area during next summer, which includes 90,000 broadband and ISDN lines. BT will then take a period of time to assess how effective the migration process has been before rolling out the 21CN nationwide.
“The purpose of the work in Cardiff is to validate we can deliver quality service to customers and for us to learn from the rollout experience,†says Beal. “We want to give the rest of industry [BT’s wholesale customers] confidence.â€ÂÂ
Reducing the potential risk, understandably, lies at the heart of Beal’s planning for 21CN transformation. The first 21CN customers in Cardiff, for example, will  initially  not be able to do anything other than the ‘legacyÃ¢à ‚¬â„¢ services that they have been used to. “If we try and enable new services immediately, we would probably break some of the old services along the way,†says Beal. “Our first priority must be for the successful migration of the old services.â€ÂÂ
De-risking the 21CN project includes not immediately migrating private point-to-point circuit-based lines, which typically carry mission-critical applications, onto the all-IP network. Private point-to-point lines in Cardiff, for example, are not to be transferred onto the 21CN, says BT, until ‘much later in the programme’.
Despite these precautions, Beal feels it’s unrealistic not to expect to run into some implementation problems along the way in a project of this magnitude. “There is only so much you can do in small-scale lab testing,†he says. “It could very well be that we find critical vendor faults or critical BT faults.â€ÂÂ
For Beal, this is all part of the necessary pain of going from being a twentieth century telco to something much more than that  a twenty-first century company pushing into what Beal calls ‘adjacent industries’, such as entertainment, and creating ‘new wave’ revenue. “No other carrier is moving as fully into convergence and multi-services as we are doing,†he asserts.
So is 21CN on track? One target that BT has set is to cut opex by at least £1 bn per annum during its 2008/09 fiscal year and to fully close down the PSTN the following year. Beal believes those targets are within reach, but, by his own admission, the timetable for the closure of all of BT’s legacy platforms is more fuzzy. The UK incumbent is still in discussion with utility customers, for example, who are seeking reassurance that 21CN can deliver the same performance levels of the point-to-point TDM-based SDH networks they currently use from BT.
But Beal emphasises that the £1 bn opex reduction target is not fully derived from the closure of all its legacy network platforms, and nor is the 21CN project itself only about network transformation.
“There are three primary objectives for 21CN,†he explains. “One is our customer experience programme, which focuses on process re-engineering to deliver services better [self-automation]. Another is to simplify our portfolio and get services to market quicker. The third is cost reduction. But it is possible to achieve cost reduction through these other two programmes.â€ÂÂ
By this reasoning, Beal expects the opex cost savings to go beyond the £1 bn level as network migration to 21CN continues after the 2008/09 fiscal year.
For BT to achieve its targets, however, it will require an unprecedented amount of collaboration among the vendor community. BT has selected eight ‘preferred suppliers’ for its 21CN rollout, and, between them, they will have to make all the equipment that comprises the 21CN  multi-service access nodes (MSANs), metro routers and switches, core routers and optical transmission kit  interoperable and adhere to open standards.
How are the vendors responding to the challenge? Beal says he is ‘pleasantly surprised’ by the amount of cooperation between the suppliers but admits BT has had some ‘knock-down fights’ with some of its 21CN vendors. “When you feel so passionate about getting it right, these things happen,†says Beal. Not surprisingly, Beal wouldn’t name the vendors that BT has had the most serious scuffles with but does say there have been ‘lots of issues to work through’ with the MSANs and the intelligent call platform.
Anticipating future technology trends is also difficult but something  claims Beal  that BT has done successfully. When he and his team put together the architecture design for 21CN back in 2003, Beal says that ethernet was ‘nowhereâà ¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢ as a carrier-grade Layer 2 technology in the wide area network. Even so, Beal says that BT still made the decision at that time to put ethernet at the ‘heart of the 21CN’, anticipating that its performance and O&M capabilities would mature. “Our vendor selection for 21CN predicted we would move into an ethernet IP/MPLS world,†says Beal. “Their capability in ethernet is phenomenal.â€ÂÂ
Earlier this year, BT issued a request for proposal (RFP) for the use of ethernet in the backbone, which is separate from the original 21CN contracts. Beal doesn’t see this as a threat to Cisco, Juniper and Lucent  which are the preferred suppliers of Layer 3 IP/MPLS core routers for the 21CN project  or an indication that BT is going cold on IP/MPLS. “There is no reason to get religious about this, as it won’t be one or the other,†says Beal. “We are looking at ethernet to deliver resilient point-to-point services, but we will still need IP/MPLS to deliver value-added applications to the desktop.â€ÂÂ
While Beal wouldn’t give any detail on the ethernet RFP, he says the decision to have one was just the ‘natural process’ of continually looking at what the most cost-effective solutions are in the market. PBT (provider backbone transport), an ethernet-based WAN transmission technology that BT has jointly developed with Nortel, is seen by Beal as a carrier-grade contender for 21CN but adds that he ‘honestly doesn’t know which bid will win out’.
Aside from vendor cooperation, BT has needed to work closely with its wholesale customers to work out ways to transfer legacy services and establish interconnection processes to 21CN  that are open and transparent  to deliver next-generation services. Beal says he has been ‘surprised and impressed’ by the support received from industry so far.
“If 21CN is to be successful, we need to communicate early in an open, honest and transparent way,†says Beal. “Itââ €šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s a different way of thinking from the past. We can’t afford to have a ‘them and us’ attitude  us and our competitors, us and the regulator, us and our customers. We’re having to go through a lot of growing pains on a personal, corporate and industry level.â€ÂÂ
I keep banging on about BT upgrading the last mile, well here it is from the horses mouth
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