Verizon picks Fujitsu and Juniper

All those mysterious fields trials and RFPs we were writing about last year are starting to graduate to deployments.

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.

Fujitsu has been supplying optical gear to Verizon for 20 years, but under this new deal, Verizon is installing Fujitsu’s Flashwave 4500, Flashwave 4300 and Flashwave 4100 add/drop multiplexers (ADM), 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.

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.

Meanwhile, 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.

“Redback continues to be [Verizon’s] supplier of choice for DSL aggregation, as far as we know,” says Shailesh Shukla, Redback vice president of corporate development and strategy. “It’s not a cap-and-grow situation.”