Count Down To Cardiff

The first customer is scheduled to migrate to the 21st century network (21CN) in November 2006 as part of the Pathfinder programme.  During Pathfinder, 350,000 residential and business end users – supported by 13 different service providers – will be migrated to 21CN. 

This will be an historic achievement and a critical step in the overall migration to the 21st century network, allowing testing of the technical, operational and systems processes that will provide the industry with the confidence to move forward with the national migration rollout. But there’s an enormous amount of work to do and a new infrastructure to be put in place before a single customer can be migrated.

Over the last several months, hundreds of engineers have been active preparing exchanges in the Pathfinder area for the rollout and migration. All exchange sites have been assessed for power, space and logistics.

In addition, three new metro nodes, or super telephone exchanges, will be built in Cardiff, Swansea and Newport, with a further ten new transmission sites also built across the region.

In addition, four intelligence nodes, or i-nodes,  essentially the ‘brains’ of the new network, also need to be developed at Cardiff,  Bristol, Guildford and London. By the spring of 2006, BT expects to have installed new equipment at over 300 sites.

It’s an enormous operational and logistical challenge, but it will lay the foundation for the delivery of 21CN to the UK’s consumers and businesses, for whom advanced communications is a critical social and economic requirement.

Continued consultation around the Pathfinder programme is managed through the Implementation and Migration Working Group, part of Consult21.