Global News

February 24, 2006
BT deploys global IP-based voice platform

NEW DELHI -- BT recently announced a £12 million investment in a global IP-based voice platform. The program, which will see the current legacy TDM network replaced by an MPLS-based network across over 30 countries worldwide, will dramatically increase the scale and capacity of BT's global voice capability and facilitate the deployment of advanced services for customers. The project, part of BT's 21CN initiative, is due to be completed in March 2008.

The resulting IP voice network provides customers with a flexible road map that allows them to evolve their voice estate to IP for voice. The new network has a distributed packet-based architecture that provides advanced multimedia features with traditional voice quality. It also enables voice and multimedia applications, hosted or premises based, to be seamlessly integrated with data services.

Tom Craig, president, IP networking, BT Global Services, said: "A single integrated voice platform with MPLS enables customers to leverage the true benefits of globalisation, avoiding the complexities and overheads of a patch-worked networking environment. The investment allows BT to integrate its global networks to achieve improved cost control and customer integration to convergence."

The new MPLS network will provide BT with an increased capability to handle larger volumes of traffic and provide additional functionalities and enhanced features such as the ease of integration with any existing servers, standard interface for multiple applications, and the ability to deploy more integrated multimedia services such as audio and video conferencing, and video streaming. In addition, the network has been designed to ensure long-term flexibility and quality of service for both BT and its customers.

Craig added: "This investment highlights our long-term commitment to provide a high-quality service for our customers. Through increased scalability and access to the global MPLS capacity, this program will enable us to provide a superior service to our customers. On this IP network, customers will be provided with next generation services at better value."

Contact:
BT
www.bt.com