Its most recent addition was the UK’s BT Group. The Westford, Massachusetts-based developer announced earlier this month that BT had chosen its Access Gateway Control Function (AGCF) product to sit in the multi-service access nodes (MSANs) on its 21st Century Network, an all-IP next-generation network it expects to have fully online by the end of next year.
We’ve already announced contracts with other Tier-1 operators in the top 10, such as AT&T, France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, NTT, and Verizon, as well as with KDDI, which is either eleventh or twelfth, depending on the analyst, said Hassan Ahmed, Sonus’s CEO.
What the company is supplying to each varies according to the way they are implementing their move to an NGN. At AT&T it is primarily the wireless side, using our core trunking capability, while France Telecom is using core trunking and our network border switching server for peering, said Ahmed. Deutsche Telekom and NTT are both using us on the separate networks they’re building for their enterprise business, while Verizon again is core trunking. At KDDI they’re replacing their entire core with Sonus.
The BT deal is different in that it is exclusively in the access layer of the carrier’s network rather than the core. Subscribers to 21CN will be served lines from the MSANs, which will sit in the carrier’s central offices [CO], Ahmed said. The various services going to the MSAN will come from the AGCF, which could be located in the CO or distributed around.
