Photo: Christophe Coat/iStockphoto

Maintaining two side-by-side networks is wasteful—of money, technicians, and even space inside the cramped central offices. Back in the 1970s, circuit-switching equipment stretched from floor to ceiling and from one end of the exchange building to the other—a single long switchboard that formed a freestanding interior wall, with thousands of copper lines running into the front of the wall and thousands more running out the back. Fortunately, thanks to Moore’s Law, new ­equipment is always slimmer than the stuff it replaces. In 21CN, the circuit switch and the DSLAM functions are combined into a single device, a multiservices access node (MSAN). Throughout the network, but particularly in the MSAN, BT will employ a technique called multiprotocol label switching to simulate, within the IP network, the virtual circuits created by earlier digital technologies such as ATM [see diagram, “Slimming the Network”].

MSANs are the first sign of just how radical a change 21CN truly is. Although each one is relatively inexpensive (BT declined to give figures), there will be over 5500 of them by the time the network is completed. Because MSANs represent as much as 40 percent of 21CN’s total equipment costs, their provision was a coveted contract; only two were awarded. One went to Fujitsu, a Japanese manufacturer that has sold DSL gear to BT for some time. The second went to Huawei Technologies, a 20-year-old company that has seemingly come out of nowhere (actually Shenzhen, China) to win contract after contract in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, in part by underbidding its competitors.

Stuart Hickin, one of the BT exec­utives in charge of procurement for 21CN, tactfully acknowledges that having Huawei as a supplier “helps manage pricing and keeps everything competitive,” but he also says the Chinese company was thoroughly vetted. “We looked at their working practices, their suppliers and subcontractors, their entire supply chain.” Huawei will also make some of the electronics for what is called “transmission”—equipment that turns the multiple wavelengths of light that flow out of fiber-optic lines into the ones and zeros of e-mail, Web pages, streaming media, and digital voice calls. The other transmission supplier is Ciena Corp., in Linthicum, Md.

The deal with Ciena, a networking specialist and leading manufacturer of ­optical-fiber equipment, surprised no one. Nor were 21CN’s other contracts—with Alcatel, Cisco, Juniper, and Siemens—­astonishing. But the failure of Marconi Telecom, a key supplier to BT’s telephone network for 20 years, to receive a single 21CN contract was more than a disappointment. It pushed the company, the UK’s last indigenous maker of telecommunications equipment, into dissolution. In late 2005, Marconi’s equipment businesses were bought by Telefon LM Ericsson, the Stockholm-based telecommunications powerhouse.

Ericsson has long been a key vendor to BT, making its central-office switches and programming them with the software behind modern telephony services, including direct-dial international calling, call waiting, caller ID, voice mail, three‑way calling, call logs for billing, and emergency service. No other supplier could have been trusted to take the millions of tortuous lines of computer code Ericsson had developed over the years and program them into the gleaming new computers, called inodes, that will replace these old switches [see photo, “Dotting the ‘I’”]. They must reproduce all those services in the new network, so Ericsson was given an exclusive inode contract. It’s 21CN’s only single-vendor deal.

BT is wary of depending on just one company for any aspect of the network, in part for technical reasons. The core routing network, in particular, which sends trillions of bits of data every second into the transmission lines that run between metro nodes, is completely duplicated, with one set of terabit routers from Cisco and the other from Juniper. Although the spread of a virus into the core is very rare, once inside, the problem would shut the entire network down for days on end. But because the two router suppliers use different software and different security ­methods, as well as different hardware, it is essentially impossible for the same problem to infect both at once.

The British telecom landscape was greatly complicated—though greatly improved—in August 2005, when BT and the government regulators agreed to completely restructure the way phone service and broadband were sold to ­consumers. Some history is needed here. In the 1990s, to increase competition, the Office of Telecommunications mandated that BT distinguish different services—access to a consumer from the central office, long‑haul trunk lines from one city to another, and so on—and sell them on a wholesale basis to other telecom providers.

This idea was tried in many countries at around the same time. It worked well in some places, such as France, somewhat well in the UK, and not at all in the United States. In 2003, oversight of telecommunications in the UK was combined with that of broadcast television and radio into a new regulatory body, the Office of Communications, or Ofcom. One of Ofcom’s first tasks was a strategic review of the relations between itself and, it said, “the companies we regulate, and citizens and consumers.” Over the next two years, it hammered out with BT an accord dubbed “The Undertakings,” a total of 230 separate agreements that took the general idea of unbundling and institutionalized it with a near-breakup of BT.

BT’s so-called last mile—the copper wire going from households to central offices—and most of the operation of the central offices themselves were split off into a BT subsidiary called Openreach. If it were a separate company, it would be one of the bigger enterprises in the UK, with 30 000 employees.

Openreach is now one of five subsidiaries within BT. The others are BT Retail, the unit that sells DSL to consumers; BT Wholesale, which sells high-­bandwidth connectivity to large businesses and to other telecommunications ­providers; BT Exact, the company’s information technology arm; and BT Global Services, an enormous provider of telecom and other technology services to British and non-British multinational companies, making it a competitor of IBM, Electronic Data Systems, and other heavy hitters. It’s the Global Services subsidiary that gives BT a presence in so many other countries.

Openreach’s existence is supposed to level the playing field in the UK so thoroughly that if IP packets were round, they wouldn’t roll even a centimeter toward BT Retail or away from any other Internet service provider. If BT Retail signs up a new DSL customer, it has to arrange it with Openreach and BT Wholesale, paying approximately $18 per month—as does, say, Demon Internet, the UK’s oldest ISP and one of its largest.

Asked whether the playing field is fair, Clive Feather of Demon offers a cautious “It seems to be. It’s still getting a shakedown in areas like ­wholesale line rental,” which is an arrangement that lets resellers put all of a customer’s charges—­telephony, broadband, mobile phone, and so on—on one bill. (Wholesale line rental is particularly important when customers want to switch from one phone provider to another.) Feather, whose business card has the logo of Demon’s parent company, Glasgow-based Thus, and in the place of a job title simply says “Internet expert,” notes that Openreach “was created to address a long-standing complaint that BT treated themselves better than others; it was BT’s last defense against an antimonopoly proceeding.”

If every part of BT is in flux, the one thing the company won’t be is a big, fat, dumb, cheap pipe company, to use Matt Bross’s phrase. What then will it become? If a metaphor for the company’s future is needed, one can be found close at hand: St. Paul’s Cathedral, its clock tower ­easily seen from Bross’s office. In London’s Great Fire of 1666, the nearly 600-year-old wooden-beamed St. Paul’s burned to the ground, its lead roof melting “in streams,” according to contemporary accounts.

Sir Christopher Wren, Europe’s greatest architect of the time, designed the resplendent edifice that stands there now, but he would not have been able to do so by modifying the existing church. The magnificence of the new St. Paul’s—with its oak arches, flying buttresses, symmetrical geometries, intricate friezes, and vast gilded dome—was made possible only by the destruction of the old one. So, too, with BT. If the company had tried adding piecemeal to its existing network, it likely would have produced a technical Frankenstein. Instead, the UK’s telephone network, like the great cathedral, is to be gloriously reborn.