"Jansen also said that around 10,000 fewer people would be needed to service and repair digital networks, which “go wrong less often” and can be fixed more easily than older networks."
That feels optimistic. Modernization does help with that sort of thing in some ways. But it also often adds complexity, higher dependency counts, etc.
The complexity is inside opaque boxes that BT deploys though. Rather than fixing things like they did in the past, sitting at the end of a street patching cables in a roadside cabinet, BT's engineers of the future will just unclip a box that's returning an error code and plug in a new one. Or someone in a NOC will reset it from 300 miles away. Maybe some AI will do that. Or a cron job. With fibre networks once the cabinet is installed and plugged into the network there's very little physical work to do. That's what engineers do now - manually splicing and connecting copper wire. That's the work that's going away.
So you don't need phone operators to wait for calls about interrupted service, the software will just detect some unreachable part of the network and dispatch a team to investigate.
To say it’s all based on copper cables, it was pretty impressive.
But I'm with you in the sense that new technology that does more than what they replaced will absolutely be added and need fresh workforces.
Sure, but nobody will remember someone said that seven years before. They might be hiring by that point, too.
A copper line isn't a continuous thing from the exchange to the customer. It's made of a number of sections that are joined together.
Now someone who once worked for a large British telecoms company once told me that they'd done some modelling, maybe using something like system dynamics if I was guessing, to gauge the effect of work on the network.
Any interaction with the equipment, whether to set up lines for a customer or even fix faults leads to more faults. So it ends up being more profitable to just leave equipment in place than to reuse it.
Based on that I would say that having all the pairs terminating at the cab instead of the exchange and using remotely configurable equipment would be a greater improvement again.
Just guessing you understand, I have no inside knowledge. ;)
The number of RFOs I see which report outages due to either fibre disturbances in an exchange or is phenomenal. I don't really have any idea how that compares with copper, but my home DSL runs over copper to the exchange and doesn't go down anywhere near as much.
What they mean is that consumers will be stuck with slow internet connections. As a result of customers switching to other providers they’ll have less equipment breaking down. Since you know it’s no longer in use.
it's going to be more reliable even if they completely screw everything up