With more than one supplier appointed in all but one of the network’s five architectural domains, only two names appear twice: Cisco Systems, in the Metro and Core domains, and the up and coming Chinese vendor Huawei Technologies Co, in Transmission and Access.

The other companies chosen are Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe in Access; Alcatel and the Communications Group of Siemens in Metro; Lucent Technologies in Core; Ciena in Transmission and, the only solo player on the list, LM Ericsson Telefon in I-nodes, i.e. technologies such as softswitches, network intelligence and bandwidth management.

Matt Beal, BT’s director of 21CN implementation, cautioned against reading too much into Ericsson’s sole supplier status in I-nodes. This is the domain in which we’ll have the intelligent components around voice and bandwidth management, and Ericsson have the greatest breadth, he began, but we will have alternative vendors for the same or complimentary functions, as well as in additional application development.

It is at the I-node level that BT will deploy the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) technology based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), to enable more advanced IP telephony features such as rich presence and context as well as the integration of mobile telephony with voice over IP (VoIP), and Ericsson’s strength in both wireless and wireline was one of the reasons we chose them, Beal continued.

In this context, Beal also confirmed that Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) technology, which essentially enables circuit-switched mobile traffic to be run over a tunnel on a WiFi network and underscores BT’s Bluephone initiative, is viewed as a transitional phase en route to SIP/IMS.

Geraint Anderson, VP of the wireline organization for Europe at San Jose, California-based Cisco, said the company would be providing its Carrier Routing System-1 (CRS-1) core router inn both its 16- and 8-shelf versions, as well as the 12000 series to which it has recently extended the same carrier-grade version of its IOS operating system, IOS XR, which binds the Core to the Metro edge.

In the triple-play voice/data/video scenario, Cisco will also supply broadband aggregation technology in its Service Control Engine, he went on. This enables carriers to charge for multiple IP services without the need for upgrades. As for Paris-based Alcatel, it will be contributing its 7750 Service Router and 5650 Service Aware Manager.

Though not covered by the current announcement, the companies in the Metro and Core domains will clearly also be favourites to supply any virtual private LAN services (VPLS) technology for BT to offer Layer 2/3 VPN services, since their technologies will be enabling the IP-MPLS network topology on which VPLS runs.

As for Murray Hill, New jersey-based Lucent, the MD of its UK business, Andrew Taylor, said his company will be providing its Element Management System along with the T- and M-Series routers (the T640 and M320) from its partner Juniper Networks Inc, going all the way up to the big core box, the TX Matrix. We’re also providing our service expertise around deploying and integrating a next-generation network, then migrating customers to it from the existing one, he went on.

Taylor added that Lucent/Juniper won’t actually be competing with Cisco for contracts in the Core, rather they’ll build two networks for resilience, one Cisco and the other ours.

Notable by its absence, of course, was the British vendor Marconi Corp Plc, a situation which almost halved the London-based equipment company’s share price and provoked a statement to the effect that, though not selected for 21CN, it would continue to supply BT with other equipment and services under multi-year contracts. Cold comfort, that. Marconi was unable to meet the totality of our criteria, Beal commented.

Equally significant is the presence on the list, in two separate domains, of Huawei, a name that crops up with ever greater frequency as a provider of telecom and networking equipment these days, whether alone or in partnership with Western players. In Transmission, it shares the bill with Linthicum, Maryland-based Ciena, which will be deploying its CoreStream, CoreDirector and optical Ethernet technologies.

Huawei’s competitive advantage has historically been their ability to support inexpensive manufacturing, whereas Ciena has continually put practical, business-driven innovation at the forefront to maintain technology leadership, commented a Ciena spokesperson. Moreover, with existing deployments of Ciena’s CoreDirector and long-haul technology, BT has already proven the value of Ciena’s technology in its network. What is not clear here is whether the two will be competing for individual contracts or, as with Lucent and Cisco, deploying parallel networks to offer greater resiliency.