BT names vendors for 21st Century Network

BT this week named eight primary suppliers for its $19 billion all-IP 21st Century Network (21CN) buildout.

The eight are the culmination of two years of discussions and negotiations with over 300 potential suppliers. They will work with BT in five strategic domains: access, metro, core, "I-node," or control plane, and transmission.

The suppliers are:

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BT this week named eight primary suppliers for its $19 billion all-IP 21st Century Network (21CN) buildout.

The eight are the culmination of two years of discussions and negotiations with over 300 potential suppliers. They will work with BT in five strategic domains: access, metro, core, "I-node," or control plane, and transmission.

The suppliers are:

• Fujitsu and Huawei, which will outfit the access domain with equipment to link BT’s existing access network with the new 21CN.
• Alcatel, Cisco and Siemens for metro, which will provide routing and signaling for 21CN’s voice, data and video services.
• Cisco and Lucent for core nodes providing connections between metro nodes. Cisco says BT 21CN represents the largest publicly announced deployment of its new CRS-1 core routers to date. Lucent, a Juniper reseller, will provide Juniper's T640, M320 and TX Matrix core routers and router clustering matrices.
• Ericsson has been selected in the i-node vendor, supplying softswitches, network intelligence and bandwidth management capabilities.
• Ciena will share the transmission domain with Huawei, providing optical electronics that will convert the signals between the metro and core nodes.

The selection of these eight suppliers will allow dozens of smaller subcontractors to also work on 21CN, BT says.

21CN is intended to facilitate the delivery of converged, next-generation voice, data and video services to U.K. and global customers. It is also designed to save BT money in operations and maintenance as the all-IP 21CN is expected to converge voice, data and video services onto a single packet infrastructure vs. a separate network for each service.