Weather and climate impacts on telecommunications infrastructure

Technologies for Sustainable Built Environments

University of Reading

Research within BT has shown that adverse weather is a significant contributing factor to network faults. Thus, weather affects customer service, increases costs of operating the infrastructure and increases BT’s Carbon Footprint through hundreds of thousands of “truck rolls” by engineers. BT, therefore, wish to develop a better understanding of these weather impacts, the extent to which they can be predicted days and months ahead, and how the likelihood of disruptive weather may be altered by climate change. The aim is to find methods to make the best possible use of knowledge derived from state-of-the-art weather and climate models within an infrastructure business.

The main research objectives of this project over the 4 year period are to:

1. develop models for analysing the impact of weather on BT’s infrastructure,
2. quantify the probabilities and impact distributions of "disruptive" events for present and projected future climates,
3. design methodologies to effectively exploit short, medium and long term probabilistic weather forecasts in terms of business impact.

The aim is to develop methodologies, tools and data sources that can be used by a company like BT to carry out weather analyses and business forecasts for the sustainability of large infrastructure business. More details here: FINAL_BT_UoR_EngD_Advert.pdf