BT Wholesale and Ventures

BT Wholesale and Ventures
Division
Industry Telecommunications
Headquarters BT Centre
London, EC1
United Kingdom
Area served
 United Kingdom
Key people
 Gerry McQuade (CEO)[1]
Products Telephony
Broadband
Digital television
IT and network services
Payphones
Directory solutions
Home security
Fleet management
Supply chain management
Services Wholesale leasing
Owner BT Group
Website www.btwholesale.com

BT Wholesale and Ventures is a division of United Kingdom telecommunications company BT Group that provides voice, broadband, data, hosted communication, managed network and IT services to communications providers (CPs) in Great Britain, including BT's other divisions: BT Consumer, BT Business and Public Sector and EE. They also offer services for media companies and broadcasters, and its ventures side offers a range of products and services. It provides the voice services to UK customers via 999, 118 500 and Next Generation Text Service, which helps those who can’t hear or speak on the phone. The division is also leading the BT thinking on the internet of things.[1][2][3]

It was formerly known as BT Wholesale and took on its current name following BT's new organisational structure that took effect in April 2016 after its acquisition of EE, and comprises the existing BT Wholesale division along with EE's mobile virtual network operator business as well as some specialist businesses such as Fleet, Payphones and Directories.[4][5][6] Its ventures side includes the following businesses:[1]

Products

Wholesale Broadband Connect

Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) is BT Wholesale's up-to-24 Mbit/s ADSL2+ offering in the UK. WBC replaced the ADSL Max product.

It also refers to BT's native fibre-to-the-premises service.

WBC is defined in SIN 472.

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.[7]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Wholesale & Ventures". BT Group. Retrieved 24 November 2017.
  2. ↑ "'Next generation' text relay service goes live". Ofcom. 6 October 2014. Retrieved 24 November 2017.
  3. ↑ Schofield, Jack (6 October 2014). "Next Generation Text Relay service launched in the UK". ZDNet. Retrieved 24 November 2017.
  4. ↑ "BT announces new structure". BT News. BT Group PLC. 1 February 2016. Retrieved 24 November 2017.
  5. ↑ "BT reports a 24% jump in quarterly profits amid revamp". BBC News. 1 February 2016. Retrieved 24 November 2017.
  6. ↑ Palmer, Kate (1 February 2016). "BT unveils management overhaul as it reports 'seven-year high' in revenue growth". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 24 November 2017.
  7. ↑ "BT Retire 20CN IPStream Connect Broadband Services at 425 UK Exchanges".
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