BT Wholesale's chief technical officer, Matt Beal, has claimed that the operator’s new 21CN network will offer enough bandwidth so as to negate them having to introduce 'Traffic Shaping' technology:


Several UK ISP's use the technology to restrict usage of P2P (file sharing), Newsgroups and sometimes other services, such as VPN. Typically while it's good to know that BT will not impose a general restriction, external ISP's will still have the option to do so.

Elsewhere Beal once again reiterated BT's position on FTTx (Fibre) networks, highlighting good results from their Ebbsfleet trials while stating that the technology was not something BT envisaged changing its policy (too expensive) on over the next couple of years.

However the opinion given to ZDNet above differs ever so slightly from one offered by BT Openreach's chief engineer, Bob Cowie. While speaking to Reuters he states:


Unfortunately Cowie then goes on to reiterate much of what Beal had said earlier, regarding issues over general costs and regulation. BT doesn’t want to spend billions building another network that rivals can then access for effectively nothing.