UK firms can start planning for access to IP-based public telecoms after BT released more details of the rollout plan for its 21st century network (21CN) project.

The £10bn programme to migrate BT’s national network to IP, which begins in Cardiff at the end of this year, will be followed by mass migration of customer lines in every region of the UK from January 2008.

The first areas to be migrated include Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford, Brighton, Bristol, Canterbury, Darlington, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Manchester and Nottingham.

BT says work should be substantially complete by the end of the decade.

Rollout of ADSL2+ technology begins in the second half of 2007, allowing 24Mbit/s broadband services to 50 per cent of the UK from early 2008.

‘We are building the core infrastructure to carry a massive bandwidth suitable for video and content rather than just music and data,’ said Ian Stirrat, 21CN general manager.

‘We will start across the UK uniformly so no region is at the back of the queue.’

BT will learn lessons from Cardiff, where some 350,000 lines will be migrated onto the new IP network between November and next summer.

‘We will have six months of learning from Cardiff to fine tune what we need before tackling the rest of the UK,’ said Stirrat. ‘We will migrate 150,000 customers to the new platform each week for the next five years.’

Mike Cansfield, research director at analyst Ovum, says UK businesses should benefit from the project.

‘All the research shows there is a direct correlation between IP convergence and economic growth,’ he said.

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Further reading:

The BT 21CN plan

BT rolls out IPnetwork in Cardiff