BT Wholesale and Ventures is a division of United Kingdomtelecommunications companyBT Group that provides voice, broadband, data, hosted communication, managed network and IT services to communications providers in Great Britain, including BT's other divisions: BT Consumer, BT Business and Public Sector and EE. They also offer services for media companies and broadcasters, and its ventures side offers a range of products and services. It provides the voice services to UK customers via 999, 118 500 and Next Generation Text Service, which helps those who can’t hear or speak on the phone. The division is also leading the BT thinking on the internet of things. It was formerly known as BT Wholesale and took on its current name following BT's new organisational structure that took effect in April 2016 after its acquisition of EE, and comprises the existing BT Wholesale division along with EE's mobile virtual network operator business as well as some specialist businesses such as Fleet, Payphones and Directories. Its ventures side includes the following businesses:
BT Redcare – protects homes and businesses in the UK against intruders, accidental fire or arson
BT Cables – supports and supplies a global client base with a range of cables and accessories
Wholesale Broadband Connect is BT Wholesale's up-to-24 Mbit/s ADSL2+ offering in the UK. WBC replaced the ADSL Max product. It also refers to BT's native fibre-to-the-premises service. WBC is defined in 472.
IPstream
IPstream is the most highly used wholesalebroadband Internet service in the UK. BT Wholesale sells the service to ISPs and IPTV providers, who use it to provide ADSL services to customers over Openreachtelephone lines. The IPstream product covers the transport of data between the end-user's premises and an interconnect point of the ISPs choice, such as their main colocation facility, which is served by one or more links called BT Centrals. BT has operational control of the network for tasks such as load balancing. Transit of data to and from the internet, along with other services such as email servers, are the responsibility of the ISP. IPStream is widely used by ISPs because it is cheaper to set up and costs less in maintenance than the ISP building its own network. This is balanced by the fact that usage costs for ISPs are higher using IPstream than their own network. Datastream is the similar system where ISPs in the UK use BT equipment but use their own IP transport. BT Wholesale pays Openreach for access to the local loop and the exchange. The alternative to IPStream is local-loop unbundling, in which the ISP obtains these facilities from Openreach directly, and makes its own arrangements for onward carriage of the data stream. Similar services are offered in other countries where there is a single dominant telecommunications provider, such as wholesale DSL from Telstra in Australia. IPstream has largely been retired by BT in favour of its Wholesale Broadband Connect.
