The National Network Management Centre is the main national
network operations centre
A network operations center (NOC, pronounced like the word ''knock''), also known as a "network management center", is one or more locations from which network monitoring and control, or network management, is exercised over a computer, telecom ...
of
BT Group
BT Group plc (formerly British Telecom) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-li ...
, situated in
Shropshire
Shropshire (; abbreviated SalopAlso used officially as the name of the county from 1974–1980. The demonym for inhabitants of the county "Salopian" derives from this name.) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the West M ...
.
History
BT moved to the countryside site in the 1980s. The NMC is also known as the ''Customer Experience and Management Centre'', the ''International Network Management Centre'' (INMC), or the ''National Control Centre'' (NCC). The
BT Global Media Network delivers television content around the world. BT Retail split into
BT Consumer
BT Group plc (formerly British Telecom) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-li ...
and
BT Business
BT Business and Public Sector was a division of United Kingdom telecommunications company BT Group that provided Landline, fixed-line, Mobile phone, mobile, Internet access, broadband and Information technology, IT services to businesses (predomin ...
.
The transformation of BT's network to becoming digital began in 1985, and finished in July 1990. BT's Worldwide Network Management Centre at Oswestry opened on 5 September 1990, at a cost of £4m.
The site appeared on the
BBC Two
BBC Two is a British free-to-air Public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's second flagship channel, and it covers a wide range of subject matte ...
documentary ''Genius of Invention''.
Structure
It is situated on the
A495, within a few hundred yards of the road's western terminus at the roundabout with the
A5, in the west of the parish of Whittington.
The site has a staff of around 440.
Jamie Ford
Jamie Ford (born July 9, 1968) is an American author. He is best known for his debut novel, ''Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.'' The book spent 130 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, and was also awarded best "Adult Fiction" b ...
, the former chief executive of
Plusnet
Plusnet plc is a British internet service provider (ISP) providing broadband and landline services. The company was founded in 1997 in Sheffield, and became a public limited company (plc) in July 2004 when it was floated on the Alternative Inves ...
, runs BT IT Services.
There were originally two buildings - A and B. Building C was built to link these together and forms the hexagonal reception building. Building D was built to be the new Network Management Centre, which has now been superseded by the ''New Wave Building''.
Display screen
The site has a large
display screen
An electronic visual display is a display device that can display images, video, or text that is transmitted electronically. Electronic visual displays include television sets, computer monitors, and digital signage. They are ubiquitous in mobile ...
, built by
Synelec (bought by
Planar Systems
Planar Systems, Inc. is an American digital display manufacturing corporation with a facility in Hillsboro, Oregon. Founded in 1983 as a Corporate spin-off, spin-off from Tektronix, it was the first U.S. manufacturer of electroluminescent (EL) dig ...
), made from 140 composite screens. The screen is ten feet high, and seventy feet wide.
Function
The site is the home of the UK's
speaking clock
A speaking clock or talking clock is a live or recorded human voice service, usually accessed by telephone, that gives the correct time. The first telephone speaking clock service was introduced in France, in association with the Paris Observa ...
.
BT IT Services, headquartered at
Barlborough
Barlborough is a village and civil parish in the Bolsover district of Derbyshire, England. According to the 2021 census it had a population of 2,855. The village is near junction 30 of the M1 motorway and is about north of Bolsover.
Barlbo ...
in
Derbyshire
Derbyshire ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East Midlands of England. It borders Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and South Yorkshire to the north, Nottinghamshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south-east, Staffordshire to the south a ...
on the
A616
The A616 is a road that links Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, to the M1 motorway at Junction 30, then reappears at Junction 35A and goes on to Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
The road originally ran continuously from Newark to Huddersfield, vi ...
, have a main operation in the building.
It monitors
network traffic Network traffic or data traffic is the amount of data moving across a network at a given point of time. Network data in computer networks is mostly encapsulated in network packets, which provide the load in the network. Network traffic is the main ...
on
BT's network across the UK, including
0800,
0845
A non-geographic number is a type of telephone number that is not linked to any specific locality. Such numbers are an alternative to the traditional 'landline' numbers that are assigned geographically using a system of location-specific area cod ...
and
999 999 or triple nine most often refers to:
* 999 (emergency telephone number), a telephone number for the emergency services in several countries
* 999 (number), an integer
* AD 999, a year
* 999 BC, a year
Media
Books
* 999 (anthology), ''99 ...
numbers. It monitors
televotes provide by RIDE (
Recorded Information Distribution Equipment). RIDE is accessed via the
SOAP
Soap is a salt (chemistry), salt of a fatty acid (sometimes other carboxylic acids) used for cleaning and lubricating products as well as other applications. In a domestic setting, soaps, specifically "toilet soaps", are surfactants usually u ...
protocol.
At peak periods it implements
call gapping load control
Load management, also known as demand-side management (DSM), is the process of balancing the supply of electricity on the network with the electrical load by adjusting or controlling the load rather than the power station output. This can be ach ...
.
BT Wholesale
BT Wholesale and Ventures was a division of United Kingdom telecommunications company BT Group that provided voice, broadband, data, hosted communication, managed network and IT services to communications providers (CPs) in Great Britain. It was ...
controls its traffic from the site.
Every two minutes the site contacts around 700 of BT's
telephone exchange
A telephone exchange, telephone switch, or central office is a central component of a telecommunications system in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or in large enterprises. It facilitates the establishment of communication circuits ...
s to find out how busy they are. 80% of BT's network consists of
optical fibre
An optical fiber, or optical fibre, is a flexible glass or plastic fiber that can transmit light from one end to the other. Such fibers find wide usage in fiber-optic communications, where they permit transmission over longer distances and at ...
.
See also
*
Institute of Telecommunications Professionals
*
Telecommunications in the United Kingdom
Telecommunications in the United Kingdom have evolved from the early days of the telegraph to modern fibre broadband and high-speed 5G networks.
History
National Telephone Company (NTC) was a British telephone company from 1881 until 1911, w ...
*
:Network performance
*
Erlang distribution
The Erlang distribution is a two-parameter family of continuous probability distributions with Support (mathematics), support x \in
* Vodafone World Headquarters">, \infty). The two parameters are:
* a positive integer k, the "shape", and
* a positive real number \lambda, ...
* Vodafone World Headquarters
* Yarnfield Park in Yarnfield in Staffordshire west of the M6 motorway, M6 Stafford services, the former main BT training centre, which now has a training site for telegraph poles and fibre