21st century man: BT is the latest old-school global carrier to reinvent itself for the age of convergence. BT Group chief technology officer Matthew Bross, who is overseeing the carrier's radical transformation from stovepiped services and disparate networks to a unified multi-service network that supports rapid service rollout, briefs global technology

Telecom Asia, Sept, 2004 by John C. Tanner

If I had to characterize the early challenges we've faced, the biggest challenge in this is the hearts and minds of BT. What you have to imagine is that inside of BT, if I'm a product person who had this control over everything and you want me to be accountable for my product P&L, why should I use reusable capabilities? If I was the person running a particular network, like frame or ATM, why should I have to collaborate in this multi-service network? There's that challenge of transforming the leadership, and I think we're winning that. I've been here about a year and a half, and I can measure a real change in people--they are waking up and saying, "I gotta do this", instead of saying, "Why do we gotta do this?" People make things work; boxes don't. At the end of the day it'll be the BT people that make this successful.

Another challenge is: how do I sunset these platforms in the network but not the services, so the customer gets the same experience? That's a significant challenge. You have to de-risk that. So it's de-risking those choices that have driven our techno-economic analysis. In the access network, for example, can I support all of the existing products and services that take about five different devices on a multi-service device, or does it have to be two? Is there one that's more copper-centric or fiber-centric? Moving one step back into the metro node, there's the whole notion of service interworking--can I get it to support my feature sets for ATM/IP/frame interworking? Can I drive all that from an IP/MPLS core? If I go above that, using softswitch technology, can I replicate the feature set in the PSTN domain, but sunset the platforms that make that happen? It's our agenda that the entire switching infrastructure is not needed if you have a deterministic IP/MPLS core, and if you offer PSTN feature sets, you could do service emulation on the edge using a softswitch environment.

The other thing that's a base assumption for us is we will apply a 3GPP architecture to the fixed-line network. This whole notion of convergence requires you to have that intelligence, presence and such on the fixed-line network so I can move between the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and WiMax access methodology along with my fixed line, along with 2G and 3G, to give a seamless experience to the customer. I've got to de-risk deploying the 3GPP architecture on the fixed-line network.

Are things like softswitches and MPLS the core technologies you're implementing to make this happen?

Yes. IP/MPLS, softswitch, multi-service assess nodes, deep-reach fiber, PON-type technologies, different wireless access technologies, an intelligence layer, and OSS in terms of service creation/service execution environments.

BT's not the only global carrier putting more emphasis on services over bandwidth, but some industry people talk about the pitfall of global carriers potentially competing against their own customers or partners. Is that a worry for BT?

Well, I think there is ... maybe it's too cute of a word, but there's a certain level of "co-opetition" in the telecoms industry that will exist. When you think about the airline business, there's the Star Alliance, and you find those carriers have similar routes. I think that with our partners for the access networks and such, we bring a value proposition to those customers, who choose to do business with BT that's different from a local provider they deal with. So in the