Why the analogue to digital switch is good news for businesses

At the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry, funer­al direc­tor and inven­tor Almon Brown Strowger endeav­oured to auto­mate the first tele­phone exchanges, with a vision to avoid oper­a­tors hav­ing to put calls through man­u­al­ly by hand. This idea would even­tu­al­ly become the Pub­lic Switched Tele­phone Net­work (PSTN), which has sup­port­ed phone and broad­band ser­vices in the UK ever since. 

But the way we com­mu­ni­cate and trans­fer data has been under­go­ing mas­sive change. Since 2010, there has been a huge explo­sion in the num­ber of smart devices and data, and that trend is set to increase expo­nen­tial­ly over the next few years. For exam­ple, a report by IDC esti­mates that by 2025 there will be 55.7bn con­nect­ed Inter­net of Things (IoT) devices or ‘things.’ Man­age­ment con­sul­tan­cy firm Gart­ner also esti­mates that, in the same time frame, over 95% of new dig­i­tal work­loads will be deployed on cloud-native plat­forms – up from 30% in 2021. 

It has been more than five years since BT Group announced that the age­ing ana­logue PSTN tech­nol­o­gy would be retired by the end of 2025 and all land­lines would go dig­i­tal. This once in a gen­er­a­tion upgrade will see the vast major­i­ty of homes and busi­ness­es pro­vid­ed with a broad­band or data line and will allow calls to be made over the top using ‘voice over IP’ (VoIP) tech­nol­o­gy.

Despite the upcom­ing change, as recent­ly as 2021, 70% of busi­ness­es were still using tra­di­tion­al land­lines, and ana­logue tech like fax machines. 

BT Busi­ness is work­ing with its cus­tomers to move them from lega­cy net­work solu­tions to a new dig­i­tal net­work and help­ing them find the ser­vice that best suits their needs.

“PSTN sim­ply doesn’t pro­vide the infra­struc­ture for the kind of dig­i­tal ser­vices that the UK needs today. It’s expen­sive, it uses a lot of pow­er and it takes up a lot of space,” says Marc Over­ton, MD of Divi­sion X, part of BT Busi­ness. “The bril­liant thing, of course, is that at the same time we’re retir­ing the PSTN, we’re mak­ing this mas­sive invest­ment in our fixed and mobile net­works, as well as tech­nolo­gies such as IoT. These are built to sup­port the new ways we’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing, whether we’re talk­ing about peo­ple, devices or machines.” 

The switch over is hap­pen­ing at a time when con­nec­tiv­i­ty has become even more intrin­sic to the way we work and live. Just as Strowger’s idea opened the way for an ear­ly kind of automa­tion, the next wave of dig­i­tal automa­tion lies ahead. The com­bi­na­tion of dig­i­tal, all-IP and full fibre optic net­work invest­ments will open up a “whole bunch” of new oppor­tu­ni­ties for the mod­ern era, adds Over­ton, where real-time pro­cess­ing and uni­fied com­mu­ni­ca­tions are required, video is as impor­tant as voice, and high-speed redun­dant data is need­ed.

The PSTN switch off isn’t only about VoIP or mobile, it’s also about ensur­ing com­pa­nies have the right solu­tion to match their needs post switch off, espe­cial­ly when many are con­cerned about the require­ment to invest. There is also the oppor­tu­ni­ty to sup­port busi­ness­es by util­is­ing 4G or 5G con­nec­tiv­i­ty instead – in which pri­ma­ry ser­vices are replaced with strong data con­nec­tion.

BT is invest­ing in tech­nolo­gies to help cus­tomers as they move away from lega­cy PSTN end­points and instead take advan­tage of smart and instant con­nec­tions, increased ben­e­fits, busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity, pre­ven­tion of main­te­nance issues and loss of con­nec­tion. After the pan­dem­ic, hybrid and remote work­ing are increas­ing­ly the default. This Zoomi­fi­ca­tion of the plan­et put both the pow­er and neces­si­ty of dig­i­tal on dis­play and, accord­ing to the Office for Nation­al Sta­tis­tics, the num­ber of hybrid work­ers has leapt from 13% in Feb­ru­ary 2022 to 24% in May.

But the poten­tial goes far fur­ther than run­ning your meet­ings on Zoom. With the 5G roll­out in the UK promis­ing faster, bet­ter con­nec­tiv­i­ty for indi­vid­u­als and busi­ness­es via pub­lic and pri­vate net­works, for­ward-look­ing organ­i­sa­tions in all kinds of indus­tries are already reshap­ing their sec­tors.

Con­sid­er man­u­fac­tur­ing; a sec­tor in which main­te­nance and break/fix issues with equip­ment has typ­i­cal­ly tra­di­tion­al­ly involved fre­quent onsite vis­its. Now, employ­ees are able to use ‘dig­i­tal twins’ – sim­u­lat­ed vir­tu­al ver­sions of facil­i­ty oper­a­tions tied to real ana­lyt­ics – of the fac­to­ry floor. Once vir­tu­alised, the dig­i­tal mod­els can be worked on by employ­ees in dif­fer­ent loca­tions, using VR or AR head­sets to view the infra­struc­ture. This is real and oper­a­tional today, with engi­neers solv­ing assem­bly line issues remote­ly via VR, all con­nect­ed by 5G. 

Increas­ing adop­tion of 5G pri­vate net­works is a pri­or­i­ty for BT. Its work in the broad­cast indus­try, for exam­ple, has also demon­strat­ed the pow­er­ful ben­e­fits that this tech­nol­o­gy can pro­vide. 

Dur­ing a Gal­lagher Pre­mier­ship Rug­by match between Sara­cens and Northamp­ton Saints, mul­ti­ple match­day cam­eras were con­nect­ed via a stand­alone 5G pri­vate net­work installed at the ground. These cam­eras’ out­put then formed part of the live BT Sport cov­er­age of the match in a UK-first; nev­er had key match­day cam­eras, as part of a cus­tomer broad­cast, been enabled in this way.

Just a few months lat­er, BT fol­lowed this up by deploy­ing a portable 5G pri­vate net­work, this time in part­ner­ship with the BBC, for TV cov­er­age of the Com­mon­wealth Games in Birm­ing­ham; the first time the tech­nol­o­gy had been deployed for an event on this scale any­where in Europe.

This ‘dig­i­tal vision’ means any loca­tion with a mod­ern IP net­work or 5G con­nec­tiv­i­ty can take advan­tage of AI to auto­mate labo­ri­ous sur­veil­lance tasks. This AI sys­tem is set up as a kind of ‘brain’ that receives real-time image inputs from a slew of cam­eras or drones. 

Rather than staffing a con­trol room with a whole set of screens, the dig­i­tal tool can process the images and intel­li­gent­ly spot anom­alies. That means that detect­ing unusu­al behav­iour, like tres­passers in areas they shouldn’t be in, can be auto­mat­ed.

Between the low­er cost of equip­ment, net­works improv­ing, and bet­ter AI, dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives that would have been unman­age­ably cost­ly or even unimag­in­able only a decade ago are a real­i­ty today, for exam­ple, in drone deliv­ery ser­vices in remote parts of the world. 

“A tru­ism is that the future is here, it’s just not even­ly dis­trib­uted,” says Over­ton. “So even with the more out­er edge use cas­es, you’ll find peo­ple around the world have indus­tri­alised them.”

These kinds of for­ward-look­ing use cas­es are made pos­si­ble by the upcom­ing dig­i­tal switch. The mis­sion of BT’s Divi­sion X, launched last year, is to help organ­i­sa­tions realise out­comes like these, and reimag­ine what is pos­si­ble in their indus­try.

To get to that point, though, a large part of mak­ing these ini­tia­tives a real­i­ty will require a cul­tur­al shift in the mind­set of busi­ness lead­ers. This isn’t just future-gaz­ing, it’s what’s here and now, and a dig­i­tal-first mind­set must be fos­tered and encour­aged to spread through­out organ­i­sa­tions, and reskilling pro­grammes intro­duced to plug any gaps in skills.

The pan­dem­ic taught busi­ness­es that deploy­ing com­plex dig­i­tal strate­gies at rapid speeds is achiev­able. Mov­ing slow­ly is not sus­tain­able for busi­ness­es in an ultra-com­pet­i­tive world, says Over­ton. “It’s about tal­ent; it’s about putting the right peo­ple in the right roles; it’s about reimag­in­ing the busi­ness. And I think it’s also about think­ing in a more rev­o­lu­tion­ary way – a dif­fer­ent way – to do things rather than slow­ly improv­ing,” he says.

Busi­ness­es at the fore­front of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion are now tak­ing a more agile, tri­al, test and learn approach to dis­cov­er what their capa­bil­i­ties are, and how they can broad­en them, so it’s crit­i­cal that organ­i­sa­tions hold onto their curios­i­ty about what is pos­si­ble with tech­nol­o­gy. And in reces­sion­ary times, it becomes even more impor­tant for organ­i­sa­tions to focus on how they can mod­ernise and future-proof, because more effi­cien­cy means low­er costs, while automa­tion means nim­bler, more agile organ­i­sa­tions.

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