 BT delivers first successful trial of new live streaming technology
By Chris Bramley, Managing director, NAS and architecture, Networks, BT
It’s the era of box office events driving huge online traffic, and in the case of Taylor Swift, literally the ‘Eras’. During her tour she smashed records for the most mobile data used during a standalone concert at Wembley Stadium. And while Swifties streamed their favourite songs in 2024, we saw sports lovers also drive record highs of online traffic. Over 11.5 million homes streamed a home-nations match at Euro 2024 and there was a record weekend of data in July, driven by Formula One at Silverstone, Women’s T20 cricket, international rugby and tennis action on the grass courts of SW19.
Without doubt, the demand for live content will continue and innovation will be part of the answer to deliver faster streaming, of higher quality content, to an even greater number of devices.
In late 2023, responding to this challenge, we launched MAUD (Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery) – BT Group’s revolutionary technology solution. MAUD enhances live video streaming quality and reliability for viewers and increases content delivery efficiency for broadcasters and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).
We teamed up with Broadpeak - a leading provider of content delivery network (CDN) video streaming solutions for content providers and pay-tv operators worldwide, to leverage their technology as part of the MAUD solution. And our partnership with Qwilt enabled us to deploy the MAUD solution with their Open Edge technology.
A year on from launching MAUD and we’re delighted with the results from our first trial. The trial used BBC Two content on EE’s set-top box TV platform in the live network – taking the technology from proof of concept to real-world. The trial has shown that during peak times on the network, the MAUD solution has converted over 60 percent of traffic from unicast delivery to multicast delivery. In simpler terms, the trial has demonstrated MAUD’s ability to flatten peaks of network traffic, by switching to multicast delivery, which is a more efficient way of delivering content over the internet.
Moving to the next stage of the trial, BT Group is looking to broaden the scope to include more channels, build out the full feature set, as well as to test the addition of dynamic ad insertion, which would enable a seamless, personalised ad experience for viewers. As seen during the recent Super-Bowl, there is high demand for ad space for live sports with CEO of Fox, Lachlan Murdoch, commenting that ‘ad space had sold out at record pricing’.
As millions look forward to watching the next live event, we’ll continue to innovate and collaborate with content and application providers, on technologies such as MAUD, to make sure that we collectively deliver the best experiences for our shared customers.
[...] |
Strategic Shift as BT No Longer Being Ditched as UK Consumer Brand
Broadband and telecoms giant BT appears to have confirmed that their strategy of turning EE into the group’s “flagship brand for our consumer customers”, which was eventually expected to result in the BT brand focusing more on business customers, will no longer result in the original brand being retired for consumer products.
Just to recap. Back in April 2022 the BT Group announced a significant and surprising change in their branding strategy (here), which sought simplification (i.e. no more having “two of everything“) by turning EE into their “flagship brand” for most consumer customers, while BT would become the main brand for their Enterprise and Global units. In addition, Plusnet would have continued to “serve customers with basic no-frills broadband and landline” (although they’ve opted not to offer landline phone services on FTTP).
Since then there have been a series of gradual moves to help facilitate this transition (e.g. product changes and withdrawals), although we’ve long questioned the wisdom of the operator’s approach, particularly given that the BT brand was already synonymous with home broadband and phone services. Instead, BT’s efforts to foster brand simplification always seemed destined to fuel consumer confusion.
According to The Telegraph (paywall), the CEO of BT Group, Allison Kirkby, has now “shelved” the original re-branding strategy “amid concerns that dropping the historic brand risked alienating older customers” (this seems like a reference to their older standalone broadband and landline-only base).
A Spokesperson for BT said:
“EE is our lead consumer-facing brand for converged mobile and broadband customers but there will always be a big role for BT as one of our most highly valued brands by our customers. BT will therefore continue as part of our portfolio of well-loved consumer brands alongside EE and Plusnet.”
The report also indicates that BT will “step up its investment” in Plusnet, which seems odd given how much they’ve gutted from that service in recent years (mobile, TV, home phone etc.). But despite this, the report indicates that BT may be preparing to launch a new budget focused mobile service in the future, although it’s unclear if this will be done under Plusnet or a completely new brand.
On the one hand, we agree that the BT brand should be retained for consumer services, particularly broadband and phone. On the other hand, we’ve just spent 2-3 years on the process of transitioning consumers over to EE, and to change course now seems likely to fuel yet more confusion. Hopefully we’ll learn a bit more about exactly what BT intends to change in the near future. |
MWC 2025: Fabric to spread as BT sees no business plan B without the network
UK’s leading coms provider outlines the pressures that enterprise customers will face as AI reshapes the new world of work
BT has said it is seeing technical breakthroughs translating into massive opportunities for service providers, and one of its key customers in this arena, Colin Bannon, CTO of BT Business, told a Cisco event at MWC 2025 that in this reshaped world of work, the network is the computer and is a fundamental prerequisite for artificial intelligence (AI) to work.
The presentation in Barcelona came just days after BT announced customer traffic was now live on its AI-ready Global Fabric network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform, which is designed to connect the multiple clouds businesses use for their applications and data and will allow them to take advantage of the new wave of digital automation and AI.
Running on the underlay of the deterministic network is an AI-powered digital orchestration layer, with BT supplying customers with a predictable application experience they expect by selecting the optimal end-to-end paths for their applications and workloads as they move to and between multiple clouds and end users.
Options will include a BT-enhanced internet service, point-to-point Ethernet, multi-point Ethernet and MPLS, and these will be offered in bandwidth increments of 1 Mbps up to 100 Gbps. Connectivity will be interchangeable on the same port, offering flexibility that BT said is not possible on current networks.
When fully built out, Global Fabric will be available to customers internationally via 140 points of presence, hosted in cloud locations across 40 countries. It will offer 74% direct coverage of hyper-scaler clouds and pre-provisioned, high-bandwidth connectivity to more than 700 datacentres.
Assessing the opportunities that the new infrastructure could provide, Bannon observed that how to stay relevant for the ongoing challenges faced by the customers BT serves, mainly from international business, governments and multinationals, is a major challenge. The company, he believed, needed to rethink how to address business customer priorities in a world of increasingly distributed workloads and progressively sophisticated cyber threats.
Even though many opportunities existed through the new platform, Bannon was adamant that trust was one thing that BT simply could not give up on and that network performance to support the new AI enabled was also crucial in a world where “slow is the new down”.
He added: “You’ve got to where you have this journey where you need full stack observability of the [network] experience and of the applications going on there. We used to design networks [that were] persona-based [looking at] people, things and apps. Now we have agents as well, from an AI perspective, and all of them have a set of requirements on what they’re doing.
“So, providing a service where you deliver outcomes on both assurance and security but also end user experience is going to be really important. [And we need to think] about our mobile network and the convergence of the fixed network and those outcomes.”
Enterprises are thinking very closely about mobile networks – in particular, 5G networks carrying AI workloads. A key element is the rapidly increasing amount of AI that is being loaded onto handset as manufacturers begin moving AI models on the devices, and this is seeing IT leaders question company policies reading as to exactly where data generated though AI services is stored and how secure it is.
“Our goal is to have the best network for AI in the UK for mobile as well as fixed. It’s really ‘watch this space’ for the enterprises,” said Bannon. “It is interesting. The vendors are turning [AI models] onto the devices, but I speak to a lot of CIOs, and six months ago, about half of them said, ‘I’m thinking about stopping bring-your-own-device [BYOD] policies’, because they’re afraid of data loss [such as from] new employees, new generations who are very technologically savvy [who are] installing dictation AI apps on their BYOD devices, [and companies don’t] know where the data is necessarily going with the third-party services.
“I think having overlay services, AI defence and data loss protection to deal with that [is preferable to] banning things. In the next 12 months, AI will be the new UI for these mobile devices. We need to work with the manufacturers to get a really good capacity model and understanding of the fingerprint of the network to [find] the propensity model of AI traffic on mobile networks. That way, we’re able to make the adjustments in the network and be able to serve it brilliantly. That’ll be a big piece of work as we go forward to make sure that our mobile network is AI ready.”
Bannon noted that there would be number of key elements on which BT, working with Cisco, would need to develop in order to realise the full stack of Global Fabric. This involved the SD-WAN and the data sovereignty, the latter case not just for data at rest in storage but also for data in motion. If you have standard mode between two ISPs on the internet, and data reconverges, it may reconverge outside of the hoist country.
“The internet is brilliant at recovering data; it was designed to survive a nuclear war, originally. However, it is geographically ignorant. Do you need to have an additional layer of intelligence on the overlay or the underlay? You can’t fix that if you’re on an SD-WAN if the SD-WAN is going underneath. You can’t geofence in that country. But if you have that probability under the underlay, we can start to geofence failure modes to keep the data flows sovereign, not just the data residency in the datacentres.
“My belief is that you will get better outcomes with both a programmable underlay and a programmable overlay with full stack of observability, and the two working in sympathy with the managed service around it to deliver the best outcomes and the best operational availability. But if you think about how people use [the network] with people being mobile now, having that mobile overlay capability and [offering] zero trust is still important.”
What will likely be just as important is having to construct enterprise networks that can cope with the massive strain placed on utilisation from AI, especially in terms of what is needed for training models. Bannon said that Global Fabric was constructed before AI “blew up” and that it was “fortuitous” that BT was thinking of a hyper distributed set of workloads on a network and to be able to make it fully programmable, “where you’d abstracted the control plane from the data plane”, which it hadn’t done before. Every router in its core used to compute the path to the next column, and “you didn’t have that control”, he added.
Looking at the challenges ahead and how the new network will resolve them, he concluded: “[AI] just makes distributed and more complex workflows even bigger, which makes the need for a fabric type network even more important. So, in the timing, there’s always a bit of luck.
“You need a network that can burst and that is programmable and that you can do bandwidth on demand as well. All of this programmability you’ve never had before. Sometimes it’s being in the right place at the right time. I would argue that the network is the computer and the network is a prerequisite for AI to work.” |
Register for real-time alerts, custom portfolio, and market movers
Hot Features
Premium
