21CN (21st Century Network) FAQ

1. What is 21CN?

21st Century Networking (21CN) is a large BT project that'll be rolling out over the next few years. Its aim is to bring the UK's telephone network up-to-date.

You might wonder what's wrong with the current telephone network? Well, it's quite old now and it wasn't designed with today's heavy broadband use in mind.

The new network will be able to support the services we're all using now and the bandwidth-hungry services that'll appear in the future.

2. So, what will 21CN mean to me?

It'll mean some changes to the voice and broadband services you use. Not all of the changes will happen straightaway and BT has a schedule of what will happen when. We'll tell you a little bit about them:

Voice services

I.e. Your home phone service. In the short term 21CN won't mean any changes to your phone line, plus you won't need to update your hardware. You'll be able to carry on using your phone and broadband as you normally do, you'll just be connected to the new telephone network. One big change is that in the future you'll be able to plug your existing BT phone into a dedicated IP network, using computers, or even mobile devices.

Although you won't notice any changes to start with, there's a lot of work involved to get the old network switched over to 21CN. Some of the work you'll not even notice as it's behind the scenes. However, you might notice a little bit of disruption when BT upgrades the existing telephone structure (e.g. switches the voice service over to a modern, digital IP (Internet Protocol) network. During this time:

• You won't be able to make any phone calls for up to 3 minutes, or receive any calls for up to 30 minutes.
• If you've got a broadband service, this will be disrupted for up to 10 minutes.

You can read a bit more about what work will be done at BT's Switched On website.

Broadband services

ADSL2+ is also part of the 21CN project. This will mean some pretty big changes to UK broadband (delivering faster 'Up to 20Mb' speeds). Find out more by reading our ADSL2+ FAQ.

For more detailed information about 21CN project as a whole head over to BT's 21CN mini-site.

3. When will the 21CN work happen?

It's already happening. At the moment a very small percentage of the UK has been switched over to use 21CN. This is so BT can see how well things go. You can see when your local exchange is due to be switched over by looking at our Usertools site. If there isn't a planned date shown at the moment it's worth checking back - the information will be regularly updated.

4. I'm interested. How do I find out more about 21CN?

A great place to start is our own Community Site. We'll post announcements up as-and-when progress is made on both 21CN and ADSL2+. It's also worth checking BT's Switched On website, as this has lots of information about when 21CN work is planned and the benefits of the changes they'll be making.

This article last updated 27th October 2009