After 15 Years – BT 21CN WBC Still Has 98 Exchanges to Upgrade

BT Wholesale‘s long running upgrade to the 21st Century Network (21CN) powered Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) platform, which began in 2004 and is the foundation for many of the modern digital IP and broadband ISP technologies on their UK network, still has 98 exchanges left to upgrade and some won’t be done until 2021.

Areas still stuck on BT’s older 20CN, which mostly reflects remote rural communities, are often left to suffer slow ADSL Max (up to 8Mbps) style copper line broadband connections and analogue telephone lines. By contrast the 21CN upgrade was all about bringing BT’s older network into the modern digital / IP connectivity age, which not only helped to cut costs but also brought with it a new generation of faster broadband technologies etc.

The vast majority of BT’s upgrades to their 21CN platform completed in 2017, when the new network covered around 94% of premises. At the time we were told that BT intended to replace all remaining IPstream exchanges with WBC by the end of 2018, which for example would have made the faster ADSL2+ broadband service available to 99.8% of the United Kingdom (c.1,600 further exchanges).

We occasionally still get some people complain that, some 15 years since the 21CN programme began, they continue to be stuck on first generation ADSL via a 20CN exchange and want to know when this will change. So far all such gripes have come from tiny rural communities with very small exchanges, which are often quite proportionally expensive and complex to tackle.

According to various ISPs, at the end of this summer BT had upgraded over 1,615 further exchanges and they still had 98 left to do. The good news is that this only represents around 8,000 end users / lines, which makes it a fairly small issue (unless you happen to be one of those still stuck in such a location).

The plan now is to upgrade 47 of the remaining 98 exchanges within the next 12 months (23 of those should be completed by March/April 2020), which leaves 51 exchanges left to do (equating to around 3,000 end users). At present no upgrades have been formally scheduled for the remaining 51 but they’re expected to be tackled during 2021.

The fact that Openreach (BT) has now secured the entire contract for Scotland’s R100 (“superfast broadband“) rollout programme should help the aforementioned process (here), not least by supporting upgrades for a number of key fibre backhaul routes.