BT To Spend £800m On ‘Information Age’ Expansion

BT is to invest £800 million in a network expansion programme so that it can rise to the increased demand for data communications and internet services in the ‘information society’. It says that it is anticipating the ‘next generation’ of internet, intranet and multimedia services.

BT believes that the volume of traffic generated by the UK multimedia market – which includes internet distribution and service provision – will start to match the number of telephone calls made by the year 2003.

The £800 million will be used to invest in technology which BT claims will offer transmission speeds at hundreds of gigabits per second – “equivalent to millions of simultaneous voice, data and internet calls.” BT talks of ‘intelligent applications’ that will perform tasks for customers automatically.

The communications company promises the following applications will be available via the its expanded network:

• internet access through the PC, television and telephone;
• online entertainment and business information services;
• video and data conferencing;
• electronic shopping and commerce;
• the use of multimedia devices including communications-enabled PCs, digital set-top boxes and multimedia kiosks.

These systems will be available through BT’s Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) optical fibre tranmission network.

BT Corporate Newsroom: 0171 356 5369