89 Exchanges Left in BT Wholesale 20CN to 21CN WBC Upgrade

Given all the focus on fibre services, it’s sometimes easy to forget that a few of BT Wholesale‘s exchanges are still using 20CN technology and have yet to be upgraded to the 21st Century Network (21CN) powered Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) platform (this process started in 2004). So here’s a little progress update.

Some of the areas still on the older 20CN platform, which mostly reflects remote rural communities, are often left to suffer slow ADSL Max (up to 8Mbps) style copper line internet connections and analogue telephone services. By contrast the 21CN upgrade brought this older network into the modern digital / IP connectivity age, which not only helped to cut costs but also introduced various broadband (e.g. ADSL2+) and backhaul improvements etc.

The vast majority of these 21CN upgrades completed in 2017, when the 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, but a few tricky exchanges have taken a lot longer to complete.

Overall, the latest information we have is that around 89 exchanges are left to complete and most of them exist in rural parts of Scotland, which can be disproportionately expensive and complex to tackle. We originally expected a lot more to be done in 2020, but COVID-19 has caused delays. The good news is that these exchanges only represent a bit over 5,000 premises across the whole of the UK.

A BT Spokesperson said:

“We are in the last and most challenging phase of our programme to upgrade our copper broadband capability to these exchanges, bringing faster speeds (up to 20Mbps) and more capacity. Some customers in Scotland have seen their speeds move from 0.5Mbps to up to 20Mbps, transforming their internet connections.

We have building work in progress for 19 more exchanges to be upgraded in 2021 (1,690 customers), leaving only 70 exchanges covering 3,600 customers in very remote parts of Scotland, some of these customers already have access to fibre-based services. We are continuing to examine options for the remaining 70 exchanges.”

As BT alludes above, some of these 20CN areas already have access to fibre-based services, such as Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP), as the full fibre build is nothing to do with BT’s 21CN rollout. Indeed it seems plausible that many of the remaining exchanges may be tackled as part of Scotland’s new £579m R100 (Reaching 100%) programme for improving 30Mbps+ “superfast broadband” coverage (mostly via Openreach’s FTTP).

At this point some people might bring up Openreach’s proposed plan to close 4,600 exchanges across the UK, but that won’t begin until around 2030 (here) – well after the aforementioned work has completed and it raises a very different set of challenges.