SUPPLIES RIVAL MICROTEL TEAM
Northern Telecom Europe is supplying telephone equipment to a rival Personal Communications Network consortium. The Canadian company has a 30% stake in the cellular consortium Unitel Ltd, but is supplying switching equipment to competing consortium Microtel Ltd. A spokesman for Northern said, we see no problem with this situation…our switching division has secured a contract and we are happy. However he admitted, it remains our long term strategy to be an equipment supplier rather than a service operation. Northern deals primarily in telephone equipment, but it acquired the Unitel stake when it took over STC Plc last November. The company says that negotiations on the contract were begun before Northern’s bid for STC, even though they were concluded after the bid was accepted. Northern is to provide Microtel with three DMS-100 switches which will be placed in London, Birmingham and Bristol to handle database enquiries and track user identities. A Unitel spokesman maintained that the competitor-supplier relationship has not affected us at all, and added, the switching equipment is not a big part of the Microtel network anyway. With the two other personal communications network licencees, Unitel is keen to offer a service as soon as possible. A spokesman denied that the Northern Telecom equipment would help Microtel to offer a service more quickly than Unitel: we have drawn up a shortlist of two network infrastructure vendors, the Northern Telecom switches represent only a small part of a network.
