{"id":33870,"date":"2023-03-06T14:09:31","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T14:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/?p=33870"},"modified":"2023-03-06T14:10:38","modified_gmt":"2023-03-06T14:10:38","slug":"national-museum-of-computing-to-open-new-flowers-to-fibre-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/index.php\/2023\/03\/national-museum-of-computing-to-open-new-flowers-to-fibre-exhibition.html","title":{"rendered":"National Museum of Computing to Open New Flowers to Fibre Exhibition"},"content":{"rendered":"

The National Museum of Computing<\/a> in Bletchley (Buckinghamshire, England) is to open a new Gallery Exhibition on 11th March 2023 – ‘Flowers to Fibre’<\/em>, which as the name suggests will aim to tell the “hidden story<\/em>” of Britain\u2019s telecommunications journey all the way through the copper and fibre optic broadband age.<\/p>\n

The new exhibition reflects The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) and The Communications Museum Trust’s (CMT) joint move to celebrate the anniversary of the start of a journey to modernise Britain\u2019s telephone network under the engineering genius of Tommy Flowers<\/strong>, the man behind Bletchley Park’s Colossus code-breaking computer.<\/p>\n

Flowers and his successors at the General Post Office (GPO) and British Telecom (BT<\/a>) worked for half a century starting in 1947 to make the existing copper voice network a faster and more reliable vehicle for the digital services we enjoy today. “They not only turned research into core principles of the technology underpinning telecoms – including fibre \u2013 they also built the world’s first digital phone exchanges in Britain<\/em>,” said the announcement.<\/p>\n

The exhibition itself will thus take visitors from the first pilots of those prototype digital exchanges and all the way up to the “planned national switch from copper to fibre after 2025<\/em>“. But this isn’t necessarily the best way to express the December 2025 target, which largely reflects the date for the switch-off of Openreach<\/a>’s old analogue telephone service, rather than a switch away from copper itself.<\/p>\n

The reality is that copper lines will continue to be used for many years beyond 2025, albeit mainly to serve consumers with broadband and IP-based phone services in locations that haven’t yet got or completed their transition to Fibre-to-the-Premises<\/strong> (FTTP<\/a>) lines.<\/p>\n

 The hands-on, interactive experience includes:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n