Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp’s NTT International unit has concluded a business co-operation agreement with the Cable & Wireless Plc-led International Digital Commmunications consortium for the contract operation and maintenance of digital telephone exchanges, which will be supplied by Northern Telecom Ltd: the DMS exchanges will need software modifications before they can be used in the field, and the work is being done by a technical team drawn from Japanese manufacturers such as NEC and Fujitsu; Northern Telecom, which has already fallen foul of Fujitsu, and had to agree to reduce its stake in STC Plc, parent of Fujitsu’s zUK partner ICL, to 24% from over 27% at Fujitsu’s behest, has been able to turn the tables this time and complain of the threat of details of its technology leaking back to its competitors from the software team, and has succeeded in having the chief technical leader from NEC withdrawn from the project; NTT International will plug the gap – it is barred from manufacture, and has bought Northern Telecom equipment in the past so knows its way around it; it has also been supporting International Digital in tasks such as laying its fibre-optic cable.