BT's research and development site is at Martlesham, near Ipswich in Suffolk in eastern England. It's called Adastral Park, after the RAF motto, Per ardua ad astra. For long, this site had been connected with the RAF and in fact the first research that was done here was aviationrelated, back in 1914.
Visitors can go and have a look at the centre themselves.
Intriguingly, the BT futur ologist, Ian Pearson, who is based at Adastral Park, spends his time working out how technologies are going to develop in the far future, up to 50 years hence. He has examined in detail the likely future prognosis of many aspects of present-day society, not just communications, computers and telecoms, but everything else, from advertising to Christmas and death. His task is to keep track of developments in all aspects of technology and figure out the implications for BT and its customers, including those who use Esat services in Ireland. In the field of arts, for instance, Pearson confesses that he has 34 musical instruments in his home, but that he can play only two of them, guitar and keyboard, and not very well. The extension of computer technology to many other areas of the arts will allow many more people to become creative.