The Development of Telecoms - Birmingham

Birmingham is home to the BT Tower, the tallest building in the city and a well known landmark. 

Along with the London BT Tower, the Birmingham Tower was one of a series of communication towers built across the UK in the 1960s, designed to relay telephone, TV and radio signals around the country. 

The Birmingham BT Tower, standing at 152 metres was completed in 1966 and became operational in 1967. 

The building has 31 floors, including five levels of circular aerial galleries at the top, testing and maintenance workshops, rooms for archive storage and a canteen. 

Many areas of the tower are no longer in use, including a telephone exchange installed in the 1970s, however some exchange equipment, including old Trimphones are still on site. 

In its hay day the BT tower contributed to a system that made communication easier for businesses and helped to increase productivity as the dishes were used to send signals to parts of the country that didn't have access to the national fibre-optic broadband network and the tower was part of the microwave relay that was at the time the backbone of the UK's telecommunication network and could handle up to 150,000 telephone conversations and 40 television channels. 

The original design of the tower was circular, like its London counterpart. However, problems experienced during the construction of the London Tower led to a redesign of the Birmingham Tower resulting in the square concrete building which could withstand strong winds. 

The circular aerial gallery was designed to house the satellite dishes which engineers installed using a trolley on steel rails and then a series of steel cables and poles to hoist them into place.

Over the years, the migration to digital transmission has resulted in many of the services on the tower becoming defunct. The tower still houses around 80 smaller dishes, however the last of the original four metre wide analogue radio dishes was removed on 5th February 2012. 

The area covers over 1,500 square miles with a population of approximately two and a half million and includes the important industrial "Black Country“.

There are 124,000 exchange lines, over 200,000 telephone stations, 171 exchanges, 987,000 miles of wire underground and 61,000 miles overhead. The total staff, excluding exchange operating staff is 2,746.