Fujitsu wins Verizon deal

Fujitsu has won a contract worth ‘several hundred million’ dollars to supply next-generation SONET gear to Verizon.

Fujitsu has won a contract worth “several hundred million” dollars to supply next-generation SONET gear to Verizon.

The contract is valued between $500 million and $700 million over three years by investment firm UBS Warburg. However, published reports, citing Fujitsu sources in Japan, say the deal is as high as $850 million.

Verizon confirmed the contract but not the terms. Fujitsu would only say that it’s worth “several hundred million dollars” over three years and encompasses Verizon’s three regions – the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic and territory of the former GTE.

Fujitsu has been supplying optical gear to Verizon for 20 years, a Verizon spokesman says.

Under this new deal, Verizon is installing Fujitsu’s Flashwave 4500, Flashwave 4300 and Flashwave 4100 add/drop multiplexers (ADMs), and possibly the Flashwave 4010 as well. Verizon is deploying the systems to simplify its network by supporting multiple rings with one system, to eliminate digital cross connects and eventually to support 10/100/1000M bit/sec Ethernet and digital video services, says Bob Laurent, a product marketing executive at Fujitsu Network Communications in Richardson, Texas.

The Flashwave 4500 and 4300 will support OC-192 and OC-48 rings in Verizon’s inter-office facilities, Laurent says. The 4100 will sit at the customer premises as a service access node, he says.

Fujitsu is just one of Verizon’s next-generation ADM suppliers. The Verizon spokesman says there will soon be others but he would not identify them. They will not be Cisco or Marconi, which did not make the final list, according to Laurent.

UBS Warburg says it expects Lucent’s Metropolis DMX and Nortel’s OPTera Metro 3500 platforms to also be selected by Verizon for next-generation metro SONET deployment.

Fujitsu has also already been selected by SBC and Qwest for their next-generation metro SONET platforms, according to UBS Warburg. However, they lost their position at BellSouth to Cisco’s ONS 15454 in the recent BellSouth RFP decision.

Separately, Juniper announced that Verizon has awarded it a multiyear “master purchase agreement” contract for edge routers to support the carrier’s Enterprise Advance service. Terms and the scope of the deployment were not disclosed by Juniper or Verizon, though Verizon said Juniper’s E-series routers would be deployed throughout its region.

Juniper says none of its routers have been deployed yet. But once they are, they will support and provide quality-of-service for MPLS-based VPNs, DSL aggregation, commercial wireless hot spots and transparent LAN services, Juniper says.

Juniper and Verizon officials said they did not know if the E-series routers would replace any of the 900 Redback Networks routers installed in the Verizon network. They did, however, stress that the E-series platforms were being purchased solely to support new Enterprise Advance services.

Other sources said that Verizon is capping its investment in the Redback routers and moving forward with Juniper as its edge supplier. Redback says that is not the case.

“If you look at the Juniper release, it’s a master purchase agreement; it does not indicate a deployment,” says Shailesh Shukla, Redback vice president of corporate development and strategy. “They’re not deploying Juniper in our part of the network,” which is DSL aggregation. “It has nothing to do with the DSL side. Redback continues to be (Verizon’s) supplier of choice for DSL aggregation, as far as we know. It’s not a cap-and-grow situation.”