Power of Networks

The power of networksAn exploration of the reality and promise of global connectivity.Research and analysis from the team at BT Global Services.

First there were computers.

They held the promise of a bright new future, but sat there blinking at you. They were unconnected, and not a lot seemed to happen on them.

Then came networks.

They started off uniting big organisations such as universities, governments and companies. Then they united the world.

Suddenly, people could connect online. They could talk, meet and share. And the world began to change.

We’ve lived with these changes, moved with them and tried to adapt to them, but have any of us ever stopped to really think about them? About what a network actually is and what it can do for our business?

3The power of networks

The power of more than oneHere at BT, we think about it a lot. We’ve talked to scientists and academics to define what an intelligent network is – and what the difference is between a machine and a sentient being.

Take a neuron. On its own it’s just a cell giving off electrical or chemical charges. But when it’s connected by synapses to other cells, together they make the nervous system that controls the body.

By joining together they form an intelligent system. It’s the power of more than one.

It’s a power that’s felt by people all around the world when they form networks in their daily lives. So in this white paper we’ve found networks we think are interesting: creative and dynamic networks that people around the globe have formed to solve problems and improve their lives. And we’ve had top journalists find out what makes them work.

We think these stories are good ways of illustrating different aspects of what defines a network – and what makes it an intelligent one. And we’ve asked our BT experts to respond to the journalists’ reports and flag up the things they have in common.

S is for Simple and SensitiveSo what are the attributes that are shared by intelligent networks the world over?

For a start, intelligent networks are simple. In our first report we’ll tell you about one we found in China that’s exactly that. It sends texts containing market information to farmers’ mobile phones. Simple, yes. But when that information can mean the difference between a farmer selling his only crop and not selling it, then it can also mean the difference between life and death.

We can make your network simple. We won’t sell you every gizmo going – we’ll advise you how you can use what you have. One customer was surprised when we reduced the bandwidth of their network by 75 per cent. But they were pleased when it worked better (and cost less).

The next attribute of an intelligent network is that it’s sensitive. And by that we mean that it can adapt to change and understand what it needs to do, intuitively.

For example, in the past you had a certain number of phones and desktop computers in your company. And you could build a network that joined them up.

Today, the parameters are changing. People hot-desk. They bring their own personal devices, like iPads and mobile phones, into work. You decide to open an office in Delhi or Rio. Rather than having to keep rebuilding it, you need a network that can adapt to these changes.

In another special report, we go to Greece, where people’s parameters have also changed: an economy in crisis, a currency under threat, a lack of opportunities. It’s in this climate that more than 20 new networks have sprung up to provide alternative ways of trading. Which suggests that these people are looking for a system that’s more durable, more reliable, more suited to their needs. A system they can trust.

S is for Survivable and Sustainable An intelligent network is one that recognises threats against it, and finds ways of mending itself. It’s able to survive.

For this we look at how the established media joined forces with social media during the upheavals across the Arab world last year. Faced with the threat of hostile governments, they worked together to get the story out and changed the face of media forever.

In the future, communications networks will be self-correcting. They’ll find any threat to the system or weakness in the way they’re running and cure it. But we’re not there yet. We all know that sometimes applications run too slowly, emails get delayed or phone calls don’t happen.

We can solve those problems. We can analyse how you use your data and help you give priority to the right traffic. We have professionals who’ll design your network to work better – not by adding to it but by making it fit for purpose.

And our final key attribute of an intelligent network is an important word in today’s world – sustainable. Working together is more efficient than working alone. And we found a great example of this in a scheme that’s uniting people in the socially divided city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Time journalist Andrew Downie takes us there.

Simple. Sensitive. Survivable. Sustainable.

We call ours BT Connect.

Claire Ritchie Report editor Head of BT Connect marketing

The power of networks4

Our analysts At BT, networks are our business.

And we want to share our knowledge of networks with you. Alongside these journalists’ reports about networks from around the world, you’ll find some analysis from our BT experts on the qualities that make our networks intelligent. So let us take you on a tour of the four ‘S’s…

SimpleAndrew Dell, our director of integrated services and assurance, is a big believer in standardised services to keep costs down.

Adrian Smith, our technical director for network infrastructure, makes the case for convergence, arguing that carrying applications over one reliable network will make your life simple.

And Graeme Stoker, our director of online strategy, introduces you to ‘My Account” portal a new and simple way of seeing how your own network is performing.

SensitiveDan Poulter, our senior product marketing manager, is concerned about your applications running smoothly and wants networks to be sensitive enough to adapt to change.

SurvivableToby Weir-Jones, from BT Assure, tells us about how we make our networks secure by preventing man-made threats from destabilising our networks.

Adrian Comley, our general manager for IP Connect, gives us an insight into how our networks can survive natural disasters.

SustainableSimon O’Neill, one of our strategists, talks about how BT networks can help save the planet, explaining concepts such as virtualisation and smart metering which can lead to huge efficiencies.

And finally… an intelligent future with intelligent networksAlan Wardy, from our innovate and design unit, elaborates on the exciting future of technology and how, despite living in an era of data overload, smart decisions can save us time and money.



Simple

How a market information network has given China’s farmers a lifeline

When Chinese farmer Qi Minglin harvested a bumper crop of potatoes last autumn, he wasn’t in the mood for celebrating. “I thought of suicide,” he later told local media. “So I could forget the potatoes that surrounded me.”

Qi’s home county of Wuchuan in Inner Mongolia is a farming area where locals depend on growing potatoes for survival. After prices reached unprecedented highs in 2010, Qi thought that growing more tubers would be a guaranteed money-spinner. He rented extra land from his neighbours and planted his biggest ever crop.

Saved by the beepA solution arrived with an unceremonious beep from Qi’s battered mobile phone. He read the 70-character text message, which named a supermarket supplier in a neighbouring province who needed about 20 tonnes of potatoes. Qi called the contact number in the message and negotiated a price, which wasn’t as high as he’d hoped but helped cover his land rental costs.

Qi’s text message came courtesy of Nonxintong, a service that connects millions of farmers across China, enabling them to sell their produce directly to suppliers. Eighty per cent of Chinese farmers now use mobile phones, according to China Mobile, the country’s largest phone service provider. By subscribing to Nonxintong (the name is formed from three Chinese characters which mean ‘countryside’, ‘information’ and ‘connect’), farmers receive updates on prices, subsidies and potential buyers for their crops. An estimated 50 million Chinese farmers currently subscribe to the service, making Nonxintong one of the most widely used networks in China.

Few Chinese farmers have reliable internet access. Before Nonxintong launched in 2004, they relied on local newspapers for information on prices and government subsidies. But costly newspaper subscriptions are beyond the financial reach of most farmers. “Usually, farmers had to go to the village government offices to read newspapers,” said Zhao Youjiang, head of Nonxintong’s Henan office. In contrast, a Nonxintong subscription costs just two yuan (about 30 US cents) each month. “The information carried by Nonxintong is also more timely than any newspaper report could be,” adds Zhao.


Keeping it simple There are three million Nonxintong subscribers in the central Chinese province of Henan and the service is managed from an apartment block on the edge of the provincial capital, Zhengzhou. Inside the office, ten university graduates sit at computers, checking the internet and updating spreadsheets. They also answer calls from firms demanding agricultural products, and send out the details to farmers like Qi.

Nonxintong has adapted to the needs of its rural customers. The company realised that some farmers were having difficulties subscribing to the service, so it launched its own SIM card which comes with Nonxintong pre-installed. “The service activates every time a farmer turns on their mobile phone, so it’s much simpler to use,” said Zhao.

Given the often low levels of education amongst Chinese farmers, it’s essential that Nonxintong’s messages are concise. “All the information is conveyed in under 70 Chinese characters,” says Zhao. Within that limit, each message carries information about what the buyer wants, and how much of it, along with a phone number for discussing prices.

Next stop – the citiesThe subscribers are also a source of information. “We have a network of people all over the country, who give advice on pest control and market supply,” Zhao said. That network includes more than 3,000 ‘da hu’, or farmers with larger amounts of land, including orange growers, vegetable farmers and even beekeepers. Those sources provide Nonxintong with more than 50,000 new price quotations every day.

Qi Minglin wasn’t the only Inner Mongolian farmer to benefit from Nonxintong, which according to local media enabled the province to shift an extra 100,000 tonnes of potatoes. By pooling farmers’ knowledge, linking with existing networks and adapting to local conditions, Nonxintong has seen the number of subscribers grow by up to 20 per cent each year. The next step for the network is China’s cities, says Zhao, which have been plagued by food safety problems: “We want to expand into the city, allowing residents to exchange text messages about contaminated food.”

Simple

Andrew Dell

Director, integrated services and assurance

Our customers are demanding more from us – they want a single solution that we’re accountable for.

In the past there’s been a lot of ‘bespoking’. Large customers often wanted customised international networks – or even domestic networks. I think, from an industry perspective, if you’re going to survive then you have to be able to move from a bespoke network to a much more standardised model, otherwise your costs start to go out of the park.


But in order to get them standardised, you need a very robust set of open source software, a robust process set and common IT platforms.

The big thing for us is being able to interact with our customers online, in real time, so they can order things directly from us, see their own network perform online and make changes over the internet.

It’s all about understanding how the system is able to re-route to Cloud, so it’s a much more intelligent performance from the network, and how that’s communicated back to the customer.

Ultimately we standardise that service globally so that we have a single contract, a single agreement and a single set of solutions and service levels. All the response times will be the same, so we can build a simpler, more coherent solution.

Adrian Smith

Technical Director for Network Infrastructure

BT believes in convergence – all applications being carried over one network – ultimately because it will make things cheaper, but also because it makes things simpler.

We are at a point where convergence is happening and IP-based technology is delivering that convergence. Our job is to let our customers do as many things as possible over that infrastructure and to grow a global platform on IP-based technologies.

With more and more companies using the internet not only to communicate between their corporate sites but also to host their applications, having secure and reliable internet as a key part of your corporate infrastructure is increasingly important.

So at BT, we invest in one simple core network, which can carry traffic very fast. And if something goes wrong it can switch to another router so the network keeps on flowing… and flowing.

Graeme Stoker

Director, global online strategy

Our clients are large corporations and their multi-million pound networks are big, complicated beasts that span many countries and have lots of complex links.

My job is to simplify all that. To make sure that customers can see more of their network and have more control over it, and all from their chosen online device – be it desktop PC or iPad.

Just like in the story from China – the only information the farmer needed was to know where he could sell his potatoes. What we’ve come up with is a new product to deliver network information as the customer wants it – the” My Account” portal. This also gives customers the means to manage their business: fixing faults, tracking usage and paying bills.

In research, we’ve found that while our customers want to have a BT person available to call if things go wrong, they also want to be able to sort things out by themselves. And “My Account” portal is part of making that happen.

The features have been chosen to benefit as many of our customers as possible, to make it as easy as possible to manage the complexities of these expensive network investments.

We can set up an individual profile for each user so that they can see what specifically interests them. So the network administrator can keep a view of the whole system, while the Asia-Pacific support specialist can look at the network in China, and even drill down to a specific site in China.

The portal is likely to be used most by support specialists who are looking for network updates every couple of hours, and want to track incidents, run network diagnostics and resolve escalated incidents. It will also be useful for project managers who might want to start and track orders for telecoms, assess bandwidth usage and review bills. A senior network administrator, responsible for router configuration and IP settings, is likely to use the portal several times a week. While an administrative assistant might use it once a month to check bills, rates and inventories. And the global infrastructure manager would be looking once a quarter for summaries of performance.

More capabilities can be added as technology develops and as we find out more about how our customers are using the product.

It’s all about giving customers access to manage their networks as simply as possible.



Sensitive

Joining forces to beat hard times in Greece

When Irene Sotiropoulou first pitched her idea to research non-monetary exchange systems in Greece, she was seen as a maverick. At the time, back in autumn 2008, the country had just two examples of these kinds of transactions made without euros. One of several professors who refused to take her on as a student said it wasn’t a topic for an economist to study.

Luckily one professor at the University of Crete was prepared to be Irene’s supervisor. And the emergence of another 24 non-monetary exchange systems in Greece in the past three years has suddenly made her PhD thesis a hot topic.

“The increase is really amazing,” she says. “As a researcher I’m excited as I’ve been here just as all the things I am studying have started happening.”

Sign of the timesThe question people keep asking Sotiropoulou is how much the economic crisis has driven the growth of these schemes. There’s no doubt that times are tough in Greece. In 2011, the gross domestic product declined by 5.5 per cent. To meet government targets there have been pay cuts, public spending cuts and tax increases. Many small businesses have closed and the number of homeless people is on the rise. Unemployment has tripled in some regions and stands at around 20.9 per cent of the working population. And on top of this, unemployment benefit is only available for one year.

It certainly sounds like a fertile environment for parallel economies to develop that aren’t based on euros. These systems are designed to break the trap that people without a job or income can fall into of not having any cash to buy anything. Instead of money changing hands, a barter system lets people do a direct swap of goods or services – I give you a singing lesson, for example, and you give me some bread. By introducing an alternative currency, or a way of ‘banking’ your goods and services, you avoid the need to find someone to swap directly with. Instead you can hold your balance to pay for something when you need it.


Trading on an old art“It gets people working on things together,” says Christos Papaioannou, a co-founder of the Exchange and Solidarity Network, which covers the Magnesia region on the eastern coast of Greece. “Trading is a very old art, especially in villages. It’s a natural thing for people to do and this is just another way of doing it.”

Papaioannou’s network uses an alternative currency called ‘TEMs’. He repaired some computers for someone in his scheme and was paid in TEMs. He then used these to buy some olive oil from another participant in the scheme.

Other people in the network offer household repairs, hairdressing and all kinds of lessons. Local products are also available, such as eggs, jam, olives and soap.

All the offers are made through a website. You can post an advert and search for what you want to buy. The price is established between the two parties. Papaioannou says that if you know the person, both of you tend to be kind to each other in setting the price. One TEM is roughly equal to one euro to make it simpler. And as the scheme progresses, the website can show more information about exchanges in terms of prices and statistics.

Changing life for the betterPapaioannou, 37, says he heard about these so-called ‘local exchange trading systems’ when he was studying engineering in the UK. He then joined forces with 10 or 15 people who all knew each other in the port city of Volos to set up their own scheme. In his eyes, people who have joined the scheme did so “not just as a response to the economic crisis, but also through a desire to improve their lives. There’s a movement around the world of people who want to change some things”.

It’s unlikely that anyone is living entirely off the Volos network just yet, but Papaioannou says it’s still a work in progress. He’s conscious that the network needs to get people more involved to make it work. At the moment the team is looking for a place to set up a regular market and someone to help with administration (who’d be paid for their work in TEMs, of course). He’d also like people to do voluntary work for the network, such as cleaning and repairs, as well as for the town and local countryside.

“These networks are a parallel world,” says Professor George Stathakis, from the University of Crete. “They survive because they function in a space that the welfare state can’t handle, and because they provide income and jobs for people who most need it.

“They are very viable, bring a strong sense of community and are easy to manage. And because the schemes are kept to a small area, the people taking part more or less know each other.”


Sensitive

Dan Poulter

Senior product marketing manager

At BT we do everything we can to make sure our networks can cope with change. We know that for businesses the priority is to have their applications running smoothly, all the time. So we need to make sure our networks are sensitive enough to adapt to any changes in demand.

A lot of our customers are completely dependent on application performance to operate, and if those applications stop working or slow down it’ll cost them dear. We’ve seen examples where a retailer simply couldn’t sell anything because its POS systems were ‘broken’. Another where a manufacturer ground to a halt when its distribution centre became jammed with idle trucks because the ‘system’ couldn’t tell them what to load and where to go. In both cases we were able to spot the problem in the network. At the retailer, a particularly vigorous anti-virus server was to blame, and for the manufacturer the bottleneck was at the print server that produced the picking lists for the warehouse.

These were simple network problems that we could spot and fix, saving our customers a serious amount of money.

And it’s not only about how the application works, but also what other demands are being put on your network. We’ve seen application performance brought to its knees because it runs at the same time of day as most employees use the network to access the internet. By redirecting that internet traffic off the corporate network and back to the internet Cloud, application performance got back to the levels the business needed.

But rather than wait for these events to happen, you need to be able to see them coming. So we’re working on prediction technology which can forecast traffic patterns and when they might change, so that these spikes in demand can be dealt with.

You can also use The Cloud to take the load of data-heavy files such as videos and complex presentations, to free up your server and bandwidth. This gets us into Cloud-based web management service.

In the future a lot more Cloud-based services will develop. We have special Cloud monitoring software so that we can see what performance is like from different providers, and we publish that for our clients.

All of this is designed to make sure our networks are sensitive enough to respond to changing demands.



Survivable

The news network grows

The recent events in the Middle East have brought together the two media worlds – old and new – as never before, and showed how this united network of news gatherers can respond to challenges. Here was a story that was being driven by the people on the ground, through their digital media, and the established media adapted to the challenge and shared their stories.

The old, established media has seen the new, social media gain ground from the modest blogs that appeared in the late 1990s, to the emergence of Twitter and Facebook as real information tools.

But up to this point it's often been an uneasy relationship. Trained journalists bristled at the idea that anyone could pick up a video camera and call themselves a reporter. Then social media started stealing the old media’s territory by breaking news stories before them and taking their audience – many young people today get their news from Facebook and Twitter, not the TV news or newspapers.

The old news networks responded by making use of ‘user-generated content’ often in the shape of home videos and blog posts. But news organisations were still reluctant to really trust these reports that often needed a lot of work to verify.

In return many of the social media people tended to see their established rivals as slow, arrogant behemoths, who never listened to them anyway.

But that standoff was shaken by the recent events in the Middle East. In the face of a spiralling story from locations that were difficult to get to, the old and new media clubbed together to form a new, more powerful network of news gatherers.

New allies One of the first examples was the airing of protests from Tunisia on the satellite news broadcaster, Al Jazeera. The protests were in response to the story of a young Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire in frustration against police action. A video of one protest led by Bouazizi’s mother, was posted on Facebook. The new media team at Al Jazeera spotted the video on Facebook and broadcast it on their TV channel, and the protests spread.

“It was the airing of these videos on Al Jazeera, even after its office had been shuttered, which brought those images to the mass Arab public and even to many Tunisians who might otherwise not have realised what was happening around their country,” wrote Marc Lynch, an expert on Middle Eastern affairs at George Washington University, on his blog.


News organisations change their gameInside Tunisia, Egypt and Libya the demonstrators wanted their stories to reach the outside world and get picked up by the international press. And the international news networks – looking for eyewitness accounts from places that their own reporters couldn’t get to – were ready to pick up their films, reports and comments. News organisations sifted through user-generated content trying to verify locations and reports. They used file-sharing websites such as bambuser.com so that people could stream footage from their mobile phones or PCs. They worked with citizen journalists on the ground. And they trawled Facebook and Twitter for people to interview.

The news media broke their usual policy of non-cooperation with rivals and actually shared material. At one point the only footage emerging from the Syrian city of Homs was coming from a 23-year-old British-Syrian activist and video journalist called Danny Abdul-Dayem. His footage was broadcast on news channels such as CNN, Al Jazeera and the BBC, as well as being posted on YouTube.

Amid the recent events in the Middle East, the newly enlarged network of news gatherers demonstrated new ways of reporting when circumstances on the ground meant it was most difficult to do so. There are still issues to be resolved between the social media and the established media, but for a while they were united by a bigger goal – and now there’s no going back.

Survivable

Toby Weir-Jones

BT assure, strategy and investments

For me survivability is about making sure that man-made problems, such as hackers and criminal activities, don’t bring down the information networks that are so vital to our customers.

To do network security properly you need to invest in real-time monitoring and understand how your raw data behaves.

For example, it’s the power of knowing that on Monday morning it’s normal for X number of people to say they have forgotten their password. But it’s not normal on Wednesday afternoon to see a spike in failed password attempts, so that would lead me to suspect there’s some other problem.

So if we see a thousand or more failed passwords for a bunch of people who work in an office five hours ahead, where it’s no longer morning, then you can be more proactive. We focus on capturing these kinds of patterns of activity and grouping them together. If you’re watching someone try to exploit your web applications, you want to be able to home in on that one person’s activity in that time window. There are lots of good technologies, which we work with, that are able to do that.


Security used to be perceived as an unpleasant, difficult thing that the IT department was tasked with. But to do security well the whole company needs to be involved. For example, you could require everyone to have long and complex passwords which improve security. But that would mean more people would forget them more often, and lead to a higher number of calls to reset accounts – so that’s a cost. The challenge is to weigh up effectiveness and cost so that the measures you take are realistic financially.

This is where intelligent networks come in. If the network is aware that someone is re-routing all of the company’s traffic on to some address on the internet that seems peculiar, then the network can help flag this up as an unusual event. Much of our effort is going into the nuts and bolts of how to make networks intuitively understand what the norm is, and spot deviations from that.

Just as our reporter described how news organisations operated during the revolutions in the Middle East and found new ways to get their stories out under pressure – a survivable network is one that recognises threats against it and finds solutions.

And as the service provider, we can bring it all together by highlighting the risks and isolating the problems, while making sure we provide the smooth transmission of applications and investing in future technologies.

Adrian Comley

General manager for IP Connect and BT Connect applications

It’s not just man-made problems we have to look out for, but also natural disasters.

One of the most dramatic challenges we’ve faced recently was the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011. We had five main cables, or trunks, go down. We re-routed traffic to another core backbone – that’s a network that provides paths for the exchange of information between different sub-networks. As a result there was no loss of service to any of our customer bases – the only thing they might have seen is a slight increase in transmission time. And essentially the customer impact was zero.

This isn’t the only time BT’s network has been tested by natural disasters. We also experienced an earthquake in Southern Taiwan earlier in 2011 – several cables failed but were repaired quickly. Despite large tremors affecting Kaohsiung City, customers’ network experience was unaffected.

Taiwan also suffered Typhoon ‘Morakot’ in August 2009 when three trunks went down and traffic had to be re-routed. But if you were a customer you saw virtually no change in your network service.

For us, these major unexpected events provide the benchmark test of how secure and reliable our networks are. Our networks are designed to cope with such shocks… and so far we’ve been proved right.

But don’t just take our word for it. In a recent survey of global IT providers – the ICT Ocean Report in September 2011 – customers rated us as number one for network reliability and network availability.



Sustainable

A recycling scheme that brings communities together in Rio de Janeiro

The people of Rio de Janeiro are proud that their home town is known around the world as ‘the marvellous city’. But even Rio’s most enthusiastic fans admit that another, less flattering nickname also holds true.

That other name, ‘the divided city’, was given to Rio because of its schizophrenic geography and sociology. The chic south side of Ipanema and Copacabana is split by hundreds of favelas (shanty towns) and the suburban blight that surrounds them.

Fernanda Mayrink is putting a network in place to pull those two parts of the city together.

Making rubbish countBy placing recycling bins in and around favelas, she is uniting slum dwellers, society ladies, schoolchildren, major corporations, utility companies, government agencies and local charities behind one big but very simple idea: the recycling of rubbish in return for credit towards utility bills.

“What’s my dream of a big network?” said Mayrink, community outreach officer for Light, the Rio power company that sponsors the project. “It’s big companies. It’s peaceful favelas. It’s the pool of community leaders and some of the local government departments that look after the environment, rubbish disposal, conservation and social work, for example.

“They’re all in this network together to transform Rio using things we don’t want. They’re working together to transform Rio through rubbish, making something from the recyclable goods we throw away.”

How it all beganThe project is called Light Recicla (Light Recycles) and has its roots in Fortaleza, a big city on Brazil’s northern coast. In 2007, the electricity firm there set up a network of bins to collect recyclable goods such as paper, plastic bottles and cooking oil. In return, the company, called Coelce, gave participants money off their electricity bills.

The project was a huge hit. And today, five years after it began, almost 400,000 people have the credit card that lets them swap rubbish for credits. Coelce has taken in more than 12,000 tons of recyclables and given away US$800,000 in credits.


It’s expanded outside Fortaleza to other nearby towns and cities, too. And mobile units tour more distant areas picking up rubbish.

“It is one of the most gratifying projects we have going,” said Odailton Arruda, the project manager. “We know it works because we get lots of visits from other governments wanting to see how we do it, and then we hear from the software company that did our IT systems that other places are replicating it.”

Breaking down old barriersImproved security conditions in Rio have helped Light Recicla get off the ground in the city’s favelas. Residents bring their recyclables to a collection point where they are weighed. They get a set value per kilo that is transferred to their Light account via the credit card they slip into a handheld machine.

Mayrink says a key part of the Light Recicla deal is uniting the favelas and the asphalt, as the neighbourhoods that surround them are called. Two eco-points have been placed just outside the community so the more well-heeled can collaborate.

Local businesses, fee-paying schools and even some condominiums near the favela bring their recyclables to these points and donate their credits to favela charities. It’s a remarkable turnaround given the mutual suspicions that long existed between the two worlds.

Organic growth for the futureIn just six months, Light has taken in 171 tons of refuse and 1,850 litres of cooking oil, and given back 34,000 reais (US$18,790) in credits.

“Today it’s been six months since we started and I am very happy to say that the idea’s worked,” Mayrink said. “Other areas want it. Companies want to be partners. Right now, I have about 5,000 participants but I expected to have more. I think that if I have 8,000 to 10,000 that will be great.

“It’s better to have those people who will come and leave rubbish every day. I want people who will take part, and that only works if others do the same.”


Sustainable

Simon O’Neill

Market strategy and development, and sustainability

The latest developments in communication networks hold a lot of promise for building a better, greener world.

One major advance is the flexible working revolution. Thanks to conference calls and teleconferences, employees can stay connected at home – cutting back on business travel.

But home-workers still consume energy. At BT, we’ve been looking at the amount needed to power this digital technology. Broadband is a non-stop service, so the lines that run between an exchange building and someone’s house consume electricity all the time.

To tackle this, we’ve trialled a product called “cool broadband”. It’s simple and cheap to implement: by putting a small device on the line card inside the exchange building, the broadband line becomes on-demand. So it only consumes electricity when someone’s using it. The customer doesn’t notice, and saves huge amounts of electricity. Which saves huge amounts of carbon.

Then there are the ways we use the digital technology itself to reduce the amount of energy people. For example, we’re used to getting electricity readings on our bill just four times a year. But “smart meters” can give readings every 30 minutes, so it’s possible to identify what different parts of the building are doing, and control it all centrally. It’s a revolution in the way we manage energy.

BT’s piloting this technology in the UK, for domestic use. In my vision of the future, you’ll walk into your apartment or your house and your eco-meter on the wall will control all of your devices. It’ll do your washing at the right temperature, control the average room temperature, turn the lights on and off and make sure you are using as little electricity as possible. Then it’ll feed that information back to the sub-stations.

Smart metering could have knock-on effects for the National Grid, too. At the moment the Grid holds an excess of electricity just in case there is a surge in demand that could overwhelm it. If you can balance supply and demand using network intelligence and smart technologies, you can reduce the amount of electricity that’s produced at a national level by tens of percentage points –massively reducing our carbon emissions.

These are just a few of the ways that networks can help us look after our planet better. And here at BT, we want to be at the heart of a better tomorrow.


Looking to the future with intelligent networks

Alan Wardy

Head of corporate ICT practice, BT innovate and design: research and technology

What I’m really interested in is how intelligent networks can help with some of the world’s big problems. People and machines are generating vast amounts of data and it’s what we do with that data which is crucial.

For example, people are sending 50 million tweets every day and uploading 20 hours of video per minute to YouTube.

Machine-generated data will dwarf those figures within the next few years – with sensors recording everything from the movement of cars and planes to our daily shopping habits. Location-based devices on smartphones are creating data all the time. While all our devices are becoming increasingly connected and they’ll be streaming petabytes of data per day.

And all of this data can be useful, but only if it’s analysed correctly.

Intelligent networks can assess all the information in the world – and direct the relevant bits to you.

From a technical point of view, this is all about what comes after the internet protocol. In the past all information on networks has been governed by the way the information is tagged with a label saying where it comes from, and another label saying where it’s going to.

Now we are looking to make networks more sensitive to the information around them and the context of that information, without having to make people ask for it.

So at the moment, if you’re in your car with a navigation device then you might ask it for information about traffic on your journey, and the device then contacts its servers many miles away to find the answer. In an intelligent network all that data would come to you. And anyone else on that particular motorway with that device in their car would be given that information without having to ask for it. The information will find you.

Here’s an analogy that I think neatly shows the possibilities of all this. In a classic train network, the trains run on a schedule. Each train leaves from a set place and arrives at a set place. Information networks are built in a similar way but they don’t have to be.

So imagine if instead the trains went to the places where the people were. Then imagine if data did the same and went to the places where it was wanted.

And I think all this can be applied to bigger issues as well. For example, the global agricultural industry wastes nearly 60 per cent of the 2,500 trillion litres of water it uses each year, and 30 per cent of the food purchased in developed nations ends up going to waste.

If we could analyse the point in the day where that water is wasted, could we make consumers change their habits? If we know that much food is wasted, can we change retail distribution to minimise it?

Because of smart data, algorithms and the sensitivity of networks, we are now aware of these kinds of exact details, and we can use that information for the benefit of people everywhere. Now we have the data, we can make it work. And with our global, resilient networks, you can trust BT to be the data provider of the future.


Joined-up thinking from BTAt BT we’re excited about networks and we hope this white paper has shared some of that excitement with you.

Our real life reports from China, Greece, the Middle East and Brazil show how networks can lead to better solutions… and often bring unexpected benefits.

Once people are connected, new things can happen. New ideas can emerge. Data can be joined up. New thinking can take off.

Our job is to give you the infrastructure to make those leaps. Infrastructure that will handle the day-to-day – and give you the platform for more. More efficiency, more effectiveness and more innovation.

Our experts are dedicated to taking you there. They have the knowledge to make a network that works for you, and to take your business to new levels of performance using the latest technology.

Let us connect you with the future.

BT Connect.


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Technology

Power of Networks