The TalkTalk Blog

It’s not a name that most of you will ever hear, but thousands of TalkTalk Group customers across the country are already feeling the benefits of the major Network Unification Project (NUP) being rolled out by TalkTalk Technology, the 500-strong team of developers and engineers who look after our Next Generation Network.

We’ve been busy upgrading the capacity of the network’s exchanges tenfold from 100 megabits per second to one gigabit per second – giving us the ability to provide much faster speeds to our customers.

This has been a massive undertaking for our engineering access team based in Irlam, near Preston, and those in the field. This is because we are deploying a new design for our Next Generation Network and at the same time future-proofing our capability to deliver services for the 21st century.

We began migrating our first customers over to the new network in February and have now upgraded 682 exchanges. The first customers to enjoy the benefits of the NUP are those on exchanges that have previously experienced the heaviest demand – or what is technically known as “contention for service” – as broadband consumption has dramatically increased. These customers will now see an improvement in quality of service immediately and because of the increased capacity we can deliver faster broadband speeds.

The effect of the NUP won’t be restricted to improved delivery of existing service however. Going forward the new network will also make it possible for us to offer an exciting range of new products. For example next year we will be launching an Ethernet product for our business customers, which will provide very high speed access to the internet and connectivity between business premises.

We are on track to upgrade 700 exchanges by January 2010 and all 1,700+ exchanges in our Next Generation Network estate by March 2011. Rolling out the NUP has involved a range of technical challenges which our team at TalkTalk Technology have worked hard to overcome. Hopefully you, our customers, will soon be enjoying the benefits of this project and we’d appreciate your feedback on the improvements you’re seeing.

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Posted by Clive Dorsman on 22 December 2009 15:15:00 GMT #