5G at the Heart of Converged Networks

BT CTIO reiterates vision of converged networks, placing 5G at the heart of smart infrastructure to provide connectivity to its customers.

22:20 04 November 2018

BT CTIO Howard Watson has reiterated the company’s vision of converged networks to differentiate the company from the competition.

 

Following the company’s £12.5billion acquisition of EE in 2016, BT has been working to integrate its fibre, WiFi and 4G networks into a single infrastructure, allowing it to offer new services while making its existing networks more efficient.

 

“[These] networks will be intelligently designed to cater for customers’ desire for an end to end

 

“For years, our industry has been dominated by dividing lines between fixed and wireless, copper and fibre, licensed and unlicensed, broadcast and unicast and hardware and software,” he told Broadband World Forum (BBWF) in Berlin.

 

“At the end of the day, as BT CTIO, it is my job to create a network that will suit the needs of customers who [don’t care] about whether it’s mobile, fixed or wireless: it’s about how they get their connectivity as a whole.

 

“We buy smartphones to connect to mobile networks, yet up to 80 per cent of data consumed by those devices is transmitted via Wi-Fi. The future is about how multiple access technologies in fixed, can be collected into a converged, software driven infrastructure that customers want.

 

 

 

“[These] networks will be intelligently designed to cater for customers’ desire for an end to end integrated experience where their appetite or data isn’t constrained if they are on the move.”