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IP interconnect in the new Millennium (21 December 2000)

One part of the FRIACO draft determination and current negotiations which few people have noticed is probably the most important upcoming event in United Kingdomtelecommunications next year ... and probably for many years.

Over the next few years telecommunications connectivity will move from PSTN through mixed PSTN and IP to full IP (terminology here).

How will IP interconnect between competing telecommunications operators be implemented?
That is the fundamental question: we will be involved directly in the negotiations over the next year which are intended to answer it.

And the answer must be the right answer; OFTEL has finally admitted that the way existing PSTN interconnect is done, which was definedalmost five years ago, is disastrous in the Internet age.

It is just as well that OFTEL is considering IP connectivity now but, really, it is disgraceful that it was not sorted out 2 or 3 yearsago. We have mentioned repeatedly to OFTEL that something had to be done.

If it had been done the United Kingdom would have been able to speak truthfully of having the most advancedtelecommunications network in the world - far ahead of America, for example, which is not the telecommunications Utopia it is often assumedto be - and, as a byproduct, there would have been sustainable narrowband and broadband Internet access without the idiocies we have chronicled over our existence.

Another worrying aspect of OFTEL thinking is that concepts which should be discussed at the same time are not, at least not in public; theIP interconnect negotiations - as sketched out at the moment - only cover narrowband telephony, the local loop unbundling (LLU)negotiations are mainly to do with broadband and, for example, the FRIACO draft determination does not even mention LLU apart from one tangential reference. We will try to have everything brought together; there is one chance to develop a completeIP solution from scratch and it must be taken.

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