Within the last three years, a quiet revolution has taken place in BT's UK access network. What was a telephony network, consisting of millions of kilometres of copper wire, has become, through the advent of asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), a broadband communications network serving millions of customers, and rapidly growing in the order of 150 000 new connections a month. The eight articles in this issue under the special theme 'Access Network Futures' set out to explore the future evolution of this access network. For the purpose of this set of articles, the access network is defined as the last link from the serving telephone exchange (or central office) to the customer premises. While predominantly made up of twisted pair copper, it also includes a significant amount of optical fibre, mainly to business premises, and some point-to-point and point-to-multipoint wireless links.
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