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.
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. Its ventures side includes the following businesses:
- BT Redcare - protects homes and businesses in the UK against intruders, accidental fire or arson
- BT Cables - supports and supplies a global client base with a range of cables and accessories
- BT Fleet - provides fleet management, vehicle maintenance and accident management in the UK
- Directory Solutions - the sole distributor of the UK's directory information to producers of directory products and services
- BT's Phone Book - the only UK directory that includes business and residential listings
- Payphones (Red telephone box, KX series, LinkUK) - handles telephone calls and provides additional services such as advertising, cash machines, Wi-Fi and small cell mobile hotspots
- BT Supply Chain - provides supply chain management for both Group businesses and its external customer base
- Tikit - provides software and IT services to law and accountancy firms worldwide
Video BT Wholesale and Ventures
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.
Maps BT Wholesale and Ventures
References
External links
- BT Wholesale
- Kitz WBC Page
- SamKnows 21CN Pages
- SamKnows 21CN Broadband Pages
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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