BT spreads work between its five GDCs which are as far apart as Pune in India and Dallas in the US.
To help the centres work together BT has developed a system that's aimed at letting staff collaborate as effectively as if they were in the same room.
The system is called the BT Collaboration Station and consists of an interactive whiteboard, flat-panel TV and video-conferencing equipment.
The whiteboard will display the same image in two different locations, for example if somebody in the Pune GDC draws a smiley face on the board the face will appear in real-time on the whiteboard in the Ipswich GDC, as seen below.
The system allows engineers and developers based thousands of miles apart to work together in drawing technical diagrams or writing project briefs on the board. The whiteboard can also display a projected image from a computer allowing staff to collaborate on computer work.
BT staff in both locations will be able to see each other on the video screen and talk to each other using phone conferencing.
BT wants to have hundreds of the stations based at GDCs and BT Global Service Centres across the world, with about 50 planned for use at Adastral.
Each station is linked by a 2Mbps connection, a relatively low-bandwidth link, to allow the large numbers of connections at once.
Russell Strevens, director of OpenReach technical delivery hub, said the technology had helped developers deliver the infrastructure for the trial of superfast broadband in London in July last year.
He said BT's ability to launch the trial within a relatively short space of time was "in a large part down to the adoption of the new operating model that allows us to cope with a lot of churn".
Photo credit: Nick Heath/silicon.com

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