Quote:
Originally Posted by Chrysalis
Correct, good to see you took to the time to see pass the hype and research it. ADSL2+ is coming alongside 21cn, wether or not they are classing this as part of 21cn or just doing it at the same time for marketing reasons I dont know. But on the whole it looks like 21cn is something to reduce their costs and they have decided to market it as some magic upgrade, most people might be fooled into thinking the speed increases from adsl2+ are as a result of 21cn when it will have nothing to do with it.
|
Partly right, although ADSL2+ and 21CN are completely separate programmes with very little cross-over.
BT cannot keep on using the same aging technology (System X is 20 years old!) so needs to modernise. Moving away from traditional voice-based technology to IP is a logical step as BT will then not need to have all the different 'high-level' networks (voice, data, packet switching, even telex!).
At the same time, there are literally thousands of BT exchanges arcross the country which need maintaining. Thanks to the changes in technology over the years, most of them are now at no more than 25% occupancy. So getting rid of the local exchange would save lots of money.
NTL and Telewest were quite fortunate that they could build from a clean sheet, and not have the burden of an aging fault-ridden legacy network.
As an aside, just over 25 years ago, there was a ripple of amazement in my office when a residential customer rang to order a modem from us - the very latest 300bit/sec one. Up to then, we'd only offered them to businesses.