BT selected the city of Cardiff as the first deployment site for its 21st Century Network (21CN). The migration of customer lines to the new infrastructure is expected to begin during the second half of 2006. BT plans to migrate around 350,000 customer lines in the area, including many served by other telephone and internet service providers and mobile operators. The deployment will require the replacement of equipment in more than 50 local exchanges and the implementation of new IT systems to underpin the delivery of services to customers. Three new metro nodes, or super telephone exchanges, are to be developed in Cardiff, Swansea and Newport, with a further 10 new transmission sites also developed across the region.
The company said the experience and customer feedback from this first mass customer migration project would help it finalize plans to roll out 21CN to customers across the UK by the end of the decade.
http://www.btplc.comIn April 2005, 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. Alcatel will supply its 7510 Media Gateway.
- 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.
