The marketing mission statement at BT's Network Research Centre
reads: "The NRC vision is a global network that can be accessed from any device, anywhere, whilst providing security, appropriate service quality and being economic to deploy and operate".Peter Hovell, who heads up the unit, has a slightly cleaner vision of his group's ultimate mandate. "If we can make the Internet a nicer experience and provide a range of quality applications, whether they be voice, video or whatever, the Net will become more what people wanted — a nicer place where applications just work and are more instantaneous as networks get faster, and where data will appear as required," he says.
NRC is based in Adastral Park in Ipswich, along with BT's other research centres, and has been in existence since the organisation was part of the Post Office. At this stage, its research focused on enhancing PSTN networks, but this has now shifted to the Internet and its associated protocols and technologies.
Making it all work better
To achieve this aim of "making it all work better", BT has developed
two parallel projects that will provide the foundation for the overall
vision of a more efficient network: the 21st Century Network (21CN) and
New Internet Architectures (NIA).
The 21CN is a five-year long initiative in which BT will replace its copper circuit-switched networks with a single IP-based core infrastructure, based on optical fibre. The aim is to provide customers with a single network, using both fixed and wireless links, to access broadband-based voice and data services from anywhere in the country and using any number of devices. The scheme is expected to be completed by 2009 and will cost a total of £10bn.
But while Hovell's researchers are "generally looking at how networks will evolve in the future", they are also investigating how to optimise performance at an access level rather than simply at the core network.
"Access networks such as DSL are always increasing in speed, but there comes an economic limit if you want to use different technologies to improve the operational costs of running and maintaining fibre, and if you want to add new services and facilities," says Hovell. "So we're quite interested in passive optical networks where there's one fibre from the network and we use splitters to deliver the signal to many people."
Hundreds of signals
While each home or business could be provided with its own fibre line,
this is not only an expensive option, but one that also results in
"potential termination problems in exchanges because there are so many
cables coming in".
Having only one fibre in the network and splitting it into hundreds of signals, however, currently "looks like the more feasible and economic deployment", says Hovell. Radio technology, on the other hand, could be a suitable choice "for mobility in the home and home distribution".
"Because it would be a shared infrastructure with several hundred users, each would have a moderate bandwidth of say 10Mb per second, but when people aren't using it, which is a considerable amount of time, we could steer it to others that require it. So there's the potential to burst up to Gigabit per second downloads," said Hovell.
This sort of service would enable customers to download music and video in seconds, provide for network back-up of home videos and support thin...
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