Earn more, learn more, and realise your potential Mobile Technology email newsletter Get ZDNet's mobile news and reviews. BT could find its customers stolen by rival carriers who sign up subscribers directly to fibre-optic metropolitan area networks. A lot of attention has been paid to ADSL and the fact that BT is dragging its feet about installing it. As such, there's no need for many of these companies to get their services via BT as the fibre will be right outside.
Raw bandwidth is virtually a commodity.
If you concentrated solely on bandwidth, you'd wake up one morning and find all your customers gone. The technology can be used to provide backup routes and traffic failovers in the event of emergencies, and for prioritisation to ensure that voice traffic is not held up by floods of email. Carriers could also offer the ability to temporarily scale a subscriber's bandwidth up or down for short periods of time. This could be done centrally at the carrier end, without any alteration to the customer's cabling infrastructure. In the future it will be an Ethernet world, but initially SDH will be everywhere, as that's what BT has built service on,' said Benwell.