BT is to focus less on new technology and more on optimising its current infrastructure. Chris Earnshaw, group engineering director and chief technology officer at BT, said a transition to an end-to-end IP-based telecoms infrastructure with fibre-optic and wireless links was inevitable. But he stressed it would not, and should not, happen quickly.

"The evolution to the IP world is inevitable, and we are moving towards it now, but nobody wants to scrap any legacy investments overnight," said Earnshaw.

BT's aging infrastructure is based largely on the copper public-switched phone network and optical SDH metro rings running ATM and frame relay. Mick Reeve, chief technology officer for BT's communications research and development arm, BTexact, predicts that this system is likely to remain largely intact for at least another decade.

The problems experienced by most telecoms carriers in the past two years include massive overspending on backbone network capacity that remains largely unused. This has forced BT to review its operational costs and attempt to squeeze more value from its existing investments. The carrier currently has debts of about £13.7bn.

"Cost reduction is on the lips of everyone at the moment, as are service provision and fulfilment, and inventory management. We are determined to drive up the automation of our network and utilisation of our capital resources," said Earnshaw.

BT faces increasing demands from corporates for instant bandwidth provisioning and end-to-end IP services across its current network but needs to ensure that any services it offers now can be migrated to other types of infrastructure at a later date.

"Customers need the confidence that they can configure services they require at any particular instant, and that those services can be migrated to the services of tomorrow, without leaving them trapped," argued Earnshaw.

John Cordova, analyst at research firm Infonetics, commented, "The WAN and Internet access world is changing from one dominated by frame relay and TDM leased lines to one that uses a combination of frame relay, TDM, optical Ethernet, DSL, cable and fixed wireless."

BT has achieved a degree of success in supplying businesses with IP-based virtual private network (VPN) connections between remote sites and offices. BT also wants to sell more voice-over-IP solutions, although persuading IT managers to trust their voice communications to high-latency data networks has proved difficult.

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