Re: Blast from the past...
> Then it went to "director approval required", then "director approval, and only with external visitors" and finally "no alcohol on site". Probably pushed the travel budget up, as the meetings were scheduled elsewhere...
I was told that the sale of on-site alcohol was withdrawn when the security cameras caught some senior person trying to sneak several crates of stuff into the back of their car. It was certainly long gone by the time I got there :)
However, IIRC, there was still an onsite store during my early years where you could buy "office supplies" (e.g. batteries) at cost. And even by the time I left, there were still some old-school surprises tucked away in various corners, such as the darkroom set up in a disused portacabin by the BT photographer society.
However, something the article didn't touch on - and I'm guessing it's still significantly impacting BT's expansion plans - is that the site is heavily bottlenecked. There's only two exits; one feeds straight into a roundabout on the A14 - and the other (which only opens at rush hour) either feeds straight into the same roundabout, or another roundabout which has a Tescos sat atop it. By the time I left, car usage had grown drastically; BT ended up making all of the internal roads one-way, so people could park on the "unused" side; even with this, you could end up parking 5-10 minutes walk away from your building and once back to your car, at peak times it could literally take half an hour to get offsite.
And don't get me started on the route 66 bus service. In some ways it was pretty advanced - they had digital displays on most of the bus-stops, and some sort of sensor built into key traffic lights to give the buses priority. However, it also took a detour around several large housing estates, turning what could have been a 10 minute journey into a 35+ minute journey. If you were working late at night and missed one, you could spend 20 minutes walking in a straight line and still catch the next bus at the point where it exited the final housing estate.
There might have been an effort to put on an "express" bus later on - I can't remember for certain and I'd gotten a car by then and was working flexitime, so avoided the parking/peak hour issues. However, by this point, a significant percentage of the onsite workforce was contractors brought in from Tech Mahindra (which BT still owned shares in at the time) who were given accommodation in Ipswich, so the bus services also became heavily overloaded at peak times...
In any case, I have to agree with other commentators: by the time I left (about 5 years ago), AP - and BT in general was very much transitioning away from "real" research and development: instead of developing new technologies internally, the focus switched to buying in and integrating 3rd party technologies. And even the integration work generally wasn't developed onshore: there was an explicit drive to have 90% of the resource for any project offshore, though in practice, there was an ongoing cycle of bringing offshore resource to the site and then sending them back offshore when upper management took a look at the budget figures and threw a fit.
Still, what goes around, comes around: a few years later, I was mildly amused to see an internal press release touting the fact that some division was "experimenting" with the concept that an onshore, physically co-located team of permanent employees could be more efficient and effective...
I had some good times there and worked with a lot of good, dedicated and talented people. But I'm far from sorry to have left both BT and AP...