British Telecommunications Plc has teamed with France Telecom, Deutsche Bundespost Telekom, Telefonica de Espana SA and ASST/STET of Italy to develop a managed European network infrastructure. The Global European Network will use fibre optic technology and digital switching and will provide private telecommunications from 1993. Another aim of the project is to reduce the provisioning time for international private circuits, and enable each network operator to speed up network configuration. Should network failure occur, reserved capacity will be used for circuit restoration; the network will be managed from centres in the UK and France.BT is keen to emphasise that the GEN will not overlap its Syncordia project which focuses on service provision; GEN is to provide the infrastructure for other services.
