European telecom provider BT said today it has signed contracts with four vendors – Ciena Corp., Huawei, Lucent Technologies and Siemens – that will help it roll out its 21st Century Network, or 21CN.
21CN is BT’s effort to upgrade its infrastructure and offer next-generation services.
“21CN represents one of the biggest ever investments in the economic infrastructure of the U.K. by a private company,” said Paul Reynolds, BT Wholesale’s CEO. “It will provide the basis of the most powerful competitive and productive communications environment in the world. These are exciting times and we are making good progress. Six million customer calls have been successfully carried in the latest phase of our 21CN trials, and we have more than 2,000 people working on the program.”
BT plans to deploy Ciena’s CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform, CoreDirector Multiservice Switch and CoreStream Agility Optical Transmission System as it moves its customer base from the PSTN to an IP network.
Lucent will work with Juniper Networks Inc. to supply BT with services including voice, broadband, Ethernet and VPN services, while Siemens will help build metro node capability for 21CN.
BT www.btplc.com
Ciena Corp. www.ciena.com
Huawei www.huawei.com
Juniper Networks Inc. www.junipernetworks.com
Lucent Technologies www.lucent.com
Siemens www.siemens.com
