BT announced eight preferred vendors for its 21st Century Network, an ambitious undertaking in which it plans to invest up to £10 billion over the next five years to migrate to a fully-converged, packet network.
Access -- Fujitsu and Huawei have been chosen in the access domain which will link BT's existing access network with the new 21CN.
Metro -- Alcatel, Cisco and Siemens have been selected as preferred suppliers for metro nodes which provide routing and signalling for 21CN's voice, data and video services.
Core -- Cisco and Lucent will be 21CN's preferred suppliers for core nodes providing high capacity and cost efficient connections between metro nodes.
Softswitching -- Ericsson has been selected in the i-node domain -- in essence the intelligence that controls the services.
Optical Transmission -- Ciena and Huawei have been chosen in the transmission domain. BT plans to deploy Ciena's optical switching and transmission and Ethernet transport platforms.
BT said the selection of these eight suppliers will allow dozens of smaller and innovative subcontractors to become involved in the delivery of the 21st Century Network, attracting significant new investment and employment to the UK.
BT expects to conclude contractual agreements with named preferred suppliers for 21CN over the summer.
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- In June 2004, BT outlined a five-year timetable for migrating its circuit-based voice services to IP. The mass migration of customers from PSTN to IP will begin in 2006 and, by 2008, BT expects a majority of the transformation will be completed. BT's 21CN initiative aims to migrate the company's existing multiple, service specific networks to a single converged multi-service IP based network. It includes work towards increasing the bandwidth of services provided over the copper access network as well as the trials of FTTP.
