TalkTalk Technology, based in Irlam near Manchester, is the team of engineers and developers who run our Next Generation Network (NGN).
Our NGN is the biggest in the UK and TalkTalk Technology employs over 500 people who manage the network and work on enhancements to give our customers the most reliable service possible.
A group of us visited Clive Dorsman, TalkTalk Technology’s managing director, and Neil McArthur, its chairman, in Irlam yesterday to find out a bit more about how their team is preparing for the future.
We’ve currently unbundled just over 1,700 phone exchanges around the UK, meaning that our customers near these exchanges are on our own fibre network rather than on BT’s legacy infrastructure. This gives us coverage for about 80% of the UK population but our aim is to increase this over the next year. We’re planning to unbundle a further 300 exchanges, taken us to over 2,000 in total, and pushing us to coverage of nearly 90% of the population.
We’re also upgrading the capacity of our network in anticipation of ever-higher internet usage. The industry expectation is that consumption of data online will increase by a whopping 50% year on year over the next few years. We’re enhancing our network to cope with this explosive rise in demand.
This upward trend is being boosted by the rise of online TV and video services like BBC iPlayer, ITV Player and, of course, YouTube. Soon these will be joined by Canvas, the online TV service we are a part of, which will provide an iPlayer-style catch-up service on your TV set, while also giving you additional content and features.
Speaking to Clive and Neil, it’s amazing to think that our network started 15 years ago just as a way of handling phone calls – and indeed we shouldn’t forget that it still manages three billion minutes of calls every month. But no one back in the mid-1990s could have anticipated just how huge the internet would become and how it would come to dominate the network.
The job for Clive, Neil and their team is to keep on top of these advances and make sure our network can handle everything future developments might throw at us.
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Anon
Does anyone know which 300 exchanges have been selected?