BT to Renovate IP Backbone

Aiming for a massive system overhaul, British
Telecom
Wednesday announced plans to expand its backbone network in the UK.

BT claims the renovated system will operate at speeds 60 times faster
than the current network, and will have the potential to grow 300 times the
size of its current capacity.

The number of points of presence (POPs) in the backbone will leap from 14
to 103 by the end of the reconstruction, giving BT the most access points
of any UK IP network. BT will deploy 100,000 extra IP dial ports by next
April, with up to 100,000 additional ports to be added by September of next
year.

The new infrastructure will rely on multi-gigabit routers and wave division
multiplexing (WDM) optical fibre systems to improve the system. Fourteen
gigabit routers and seven node sites will be trialed up until the expected
official activity date of March 2000.

The project is expected to be complete by March.

BT is calling the move part of its BeTaNet IP and multimedia infrastructure
strategy announced in February. The telco will invest £5 billion ($8
billion) in BeTaNet over the next five years, though actual purchasing for
the renovation began last year.

The company estimates that IP traffic will grow 400 percent annually. Even
now, BT claims that one in every four calls made across its networks is for IP.

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