Over the past couple of years, the BSIA has been heavily involved in discussions with BT and Ofcom to gain a thorough understanding of how the NGN Communication Providers (CP) are developing their networks.
Our work has predominantly focused on the upgrade of BT’s phone network. The move towards this 21CN network would be a multi-billion pound exercise resulting in the replacement of equipment in 5,500 BT exchanges across the UK and 30 million PSTN and ISDN lines being transferred to 21CN as well as 8 million broadband lines.
However, this has all recently changed with the mass migration to 21CN halted by BT itself.
Withdrawing plans
Following its completion of the initial migration of approximately 65,000 PSTN lines in the Cardiff area and a review of its NGN business, BT announced that it is withdrawing plans to transfer both PSTN and ISDN lines to 21CN.
Instead migrations to 21CN will be based around customer demand and exchanges where equipment is reaching the end of its life.
As a result of this decision, BT will be focusing on their drive toward Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) and Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) over the next few years to realise a 40 per cent coverage of high speed broadband access by 2012.
In their decision to halt the implementation of 21CN, BT has cited customer experience, as well as an unexpected longevity of PSTN networks, as two key reasons for doing so.
Voice market
Alongside this, BT’s need to recognise the direction that Openreach will take with a voice service over FTTP is important, along with the fact that large elements of the voice market have moved, or have announced plans to move, to fully unbundled lines that no longer requiring a voice service from BT.
BT also aims to avoid a negative customer experience for end-users through multiple service-impacting migrations.
The BSIA is urging the security industry to understand the impact that fibre may have on various security equipment and to that end the Association is once again leading the way in assessing any effects.
Previously, when BT’s plans were to migrate both the PSTN and ISDN lines, the BSIA became heavily involved in the researching of effects of 21CN on various types of equipment by working with its manufacturers to develop a detailed test plan and encourage members to take part in the tests to check that their equipment will be compatible with the new technology.
Test plan
The BSIA’s security equipment test plan provided a rigorous sequence of tests that covered the various signaling formats used within the industry.
Testing was carried out at the BT facility in Swansea and resulted in the BSIA increasing its knowledge to develop a risk based assessment of the impact of 21CN on security equipment.
This assessment, titled ‘The changes to the UK telephone system – how it may affect your burglar alarm’, provided a clear message to end-users, installers, monitoring centres and manufacturers, with the warning that some security related equipment, such as alarms used to alert monitoring or alarm receiving centres (ARCs), could be affected by the network changes.
For peace of mind, BSIA communication equipment manufacturers tested their core products against the BSIA’s test plan to inform industry of any issues they may face in the event that equipment might fail during or after the switchover.
Valid results
The 21CN tests are focused on sensitivity to transmission delay along with compatibility with the network. Whilst the focus of migration has switched to fibre, the results obtained so far are valid as they provide the maximum tolerance of delay independent of technology type.
In addition to this, the BSIA produced a web-based risk calculator to account for other influencing factors, including the type of receiving equipment used and the possible network routing on which alarms are transmitted.
This calculator enables the user to enter information about the equipment and receiver contribution used, which produces a graphical representation displaying the potential risk of failure.
This level of commitment to the implementation of 21CN is about to be demonstrated once again as soon as a fibre test platform is available at the Swansea test facility.
Additional test plan?
The BSIA is fully involved in this process and will work with members to consider the need to produce an additional security industry test plan for its manufacturers to test products against. Once again, the results of these product tests will be made available for download on the BSIA website.
As well as working closely with BT, the Association will continue to break ground with Ofcom and the newly-formed NGNuk forum to build on the understanding and awareness of the specifications of the network associated with the fibre offerings that BT and other NGN communication providers will be delivering across the UK.
Throughout the imperative role that the BSIA has played in the development of this new breed of communication technology, the Association has developed a detailed webpage detailing NGNs and paying particular attention to 21CN.
This can be found at http://www.bsia.co.uk/21cn#whatisthelatest and includes a range of information as well as a number of documents that are available to download (some are resticted to members of the Association only), including the security equipment test plan, risk assessment and web-based calculator.
Further updates and documentation focusing on FTTC and FTTP will be available for download from the website in due course.
