BT Wholesale
 | |
| Division | |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Headquarters |
BT Centre, London, United Kingdom |
Area served | United Kingdom |
Key people | Nigel Stagg (CEO)[1] |
| Products |
PSTN Telephony Broadband IT services Digital television |
| Services | Wholesale leasing |
| Owner | BT Group |
| Website |
www |
BT Wholesale is a division of United Kingdom telecommunications company BT Group that provides data, voice, hosted communication, managed network and IT services. They are responsible for the wholesale leasing of PSTN lines, broadband services, and other telephony services to retail customers including BT Retail (now BT Consumer and BT Business), EE and Zen Internet.
Products
Wholesale Broadband Connect
Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) is BT Wholesale's up-to-24 Mbit/s ADSL offering in the UK, which is currently being rolled out to exchanges throughout the UK as part of the 21CN upgrade. WBC replaces the now-retired ADSL Max product. It also refers to BT's native Fibre-to-the-Premises service, in which BT pays for the majority of the cost to roll fibre directly to houses, with home owners able to pay a substantially smaller cost to receive the service, though its rollout is very slow and patchy.
WBC is defined in SIN 472.
ADSL2+ has been available in the UK from Internet Service Providers since 2005, through Local Loop Unbundling.
The roll out of WBC by BT will enable the majority of the UK population to gain access to ADSL2+ services, rather than relying on their exchange to be unbundled by LLU operators.
IPstream
IPstream is the most highly used wholesale broadband Internet service in the UK. BT Wholesale sells the service to ISPs and IPTV providers, who use it to provide ADSL services to customers over Openreach telephone lines.
The IPstream product covers the transport of data between the end-user's premises and an interconnect point of the ISPs choice, such as their main colocation facility, which is served by one or more links called BT Centrals. BT has operational control of the network for tasks such as load balancing. Transit of data to and from the internet, along with other services such as email servers, are the responsibility of the ISP.
IPStream is widely used by ISPs because it is cheaper to set up and costs less in maintenance than the ISP building its own network. This is balanced by the fact that usage costs for ISPs are higher using IPstream than their own network. Datastream is the similar system where ISPs in the UK use BT equipment but use their own IP transport.
BT Wholesale pays Openreach for access to the local loop and the exchange. The alternative to IPStream is local loop unbundling, in which the ISP obtains these facilities from Openreach directly, and makes its own arrangements for onward carriage of the data stream.
Similar services are offered in other countries where there is a single dominant telecommunications provider, such as wholesale DSL from Telstra in Australia.
IPstream has largely been retired by BT in favour of its Wholesale Broadband Connect.[2]
References
- ↑ "BT Wholesale". BT Group PLC. Retrieved 2 February 2016.
- ↑ "BT Retire 20CN IPStream Connect Broadband Services at 425 UK Exchanges".
External links
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