British Telecom is one of the world’s leading communications services companies, serving the needs of customers in the UK and in more than 170 countries worldwide. Our main activities are the provision of fixed telephony lines and calls, broadband, mobile and TV products and services as well as managed networked IT services.
In the year ended 31 March 2014 (the 2013/2014 financial year) BT Group revenue was £18.3 billion with £9.7 billion of this derived from next generation products and services, primarily ICT and managed networks, broadband, TV, and convergent mobility solutions. UK operations accounted for 77% of revenues and here BT is the largest communications services provider, with around 10 million voice lines, around 7.3 million retail broadband customers, a TV base of 1 million customers and over 5 million wifi hotspots. We also provide network services to other licensed operators. For further details see http://www.bt.com/.
BT’s main research and development centre is in Adastral Park in Suffolk, UK, and is home to over 3,800 of BT’s top scientists, engineers and business people. Our employees include many who are world leaders in their specialist fields, working at the forefront of new technologies and standards development in areas such as broadband applications and services, IP and data networks, IT, mobility and converged services, network design and management, and business applications and services. We provide research, development and consulting services for BT, developing innovative technological ideas and solutions that translate into practical and marketable solutions for the business. Our research labs played a leading role in the development of global communications standards and we inherit from them a science and engineering base acknowledged widely as second to none.
BT invested £530 million in research and development in 2013/2014 to support our drive for innovation. Our global development centres, located in the UK, US and Asia, help us draw together key and complementary skills and resources with the objective of increasing agility, efficiency and delivery of innovation to the market.
BT is an active participant in European collaborative research and development and has participated in all the past EU Framework Programmes, primarily in the ICT area. Within the 7th Framework Programme BT co-ordinated four projects, provided technical leadership on two further projects, and partnered in twenty four other projects. Eight of these projects currently remain active.
TEAM
Andy Reid is Chief Researcher, Network Services in BT’s Research and Innovation Division. He is currently responsible BT’s NFV architecture and is a significant contributor to the ETSI ISG for Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) where he has also been editor of the NFV Infrastructure Architecture specification. He is currently working in the 7th FP project TRILOGY2. Andy has developed expertise in a wide variety of engineering and economic modelling techniques including functional modelling, information modelling, and performance modelling, of systems and is currently engaged in developing converged functional modelling between communications and IT systems required for NFV. He has been a major contributor over many years to functional modelling of transport networks starting with the first functional models of SONET/SDH. He also has expertise in optimization techniques and associated modelling with particular focus on interactions between optimization domains such as inter-layer problems. In addition, he is also expert in the micro-economic models (another form of optimisation problem) used in assessment of market boundaries and market power for the purposes of regulation and has authored appropriate sections of BT’s responses to Ofcom consultations and has also provided witness statements to the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal on both technical and micro-economics matters.
Okung Ntofon received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of Essex. He joined BT in 2013 and currently works as a Researcher in the Network Infrastructure and Innovation research practice in BT’s Research and Innovation Division. He is primarily responsible for investigating the feasibility of emerging technologies for Networks Functions Virtualization through laboratory experiments and proof-of-concept field trials. Okung’s current focus is on technologies for distributed Content Delivery Networks and Network Monitoring. He has developed expertise in dynamic placement and scheduling of resources as well as data and visual analytics.