Great Britain and Northern Ireland apparently going VoIP-only [Telecom]

Unless I'm misinterpreting a lot of the marketing gobbledegook (words that say nothing), it appears the UK via British Telecom is abandoning its legacy telephony infrastructure and rolling-out a digital VoIP-only replacement as quickly as possible.

Even re-reading some of these pages leaves me wondering "WTF?!". Does anyone following this group have a better understanding of what is really happening with BT in the UK and can share it with us?

Here are several of the pages:

which are aggregations of meaningless weasel words. Even this page:

discusses *NOTHING* about the technology of BT's "21CN" which they claim they've already implemented in 172 countries.

Color me confused and perplexed. :-)

P.S.: That 172 countries had me wondering, so I Googled a simple request per "how many countries in the world" and it looks like it's between 189 and 195, inclusive, depending on a number of factors which, though quite interesting, are off-topic here.

i think they are confusing the rollout of their latest broadband flavours and the bits of 21CN that move copper phones lines to IP backhaul

the telephony bits of 21CN are about keeping the copper phone last mile access, but replacing conventional phone switches with an IP Telephony core for PSTN

better broadband and FTTH / FTTC ar a side effect of that rollout, but probably the only service improvement visible to customers - the IPT stuff is for BT's benefit to reduce the phone network operating cost.

progress

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Note the 75000 users in Wales have migrated - but they wer supposed to be past that at least 2 or 3 years ago. I make that less than 1% of the lines in the UK.....

from your Q and A link:

n 2006 BT began migrations of phone services on to 21CN platforms at local exchanges in South Wales with the aim to migrate all exchanges nationally over the next five years. Those plans to mass migrate phone lines to 21CN have now been superseded as the attention turns to other services including the deployment of fibre optic based services.

Consequently as there are no further mass migrations of phone services from the existing phone network planned, there is now no further need to communicate with end users about these migrations. As a result the campaign has now been closed.

which sounds like phone migration is on hold - given the hassle it generated i am not surprised......