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Huawei makes 21CN connection
Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies is among the eight primary partners in 21CN. Andy Lewis who manages the firm’s BT division is clearly pleased that it has been chosen to participate. “No other operator is attempting something on this scale in such an immediate manner. The 30 million lines in place in the UK will all have broadband functionality added to them, and the voice services will be run on a state-of-the-art IP/MPLS network. It effectively means transforming the country’s entire network infrastructure within in a four year period, and engineering sixteen existing networks into one” he states. “We were signed up for 21CN back in April 2005, and were selected to contribute in two different domains” Lewis explains. “Firstly, we are involved at the access domain, where we have been charged with the task of completely replacing a share of the 5,000 UK exchange nodes so that one MSAN device delivers both voice and data services. Secondly, we are one of two partners being employed at the transmission layer. Here we are connecting the core nodes, metro nodes and access nodes together, using the latest generation optical solutions. In both access and transmission reliability and efficiency are essential, and the levels of service need to be truly impeccable” he adds.
But Lewis is keen to point out that “the important thing about engineering this IP network is not simply to be able to add the extra QoS and management functionality, it is the ability to replicate the TDM functionality set, so that the voice services that we are so used to are not affected in a detrimental way. People have grown up knowing what they should expect when they pick up the phone, if latency or signal quality were suddenly impinged by the move to NGN, then BT would clearly risk having a lot of unhappy customers to deal with. So the whole transition must be seamless.” He states, “We work closely with both the test equipment vendors and test laboratories to make sure that everything dovetails together, and no critical anomalies appear.”
As so many partners, each with their own subcontractors, have a hand in 21CN’s evolution, it could be assumed that avoiding technical hitches would be arduous. “It is obviously not easy to integrate the work done by all these parties into one entity” says Lewis “but BT has done a great job of creating an environment in which all the partners can work, so that the project runs smoothly. This is something that it is clearly difficult to do, given the number of companies involved and so many separate challenges to face.”
When questioned as to whether after these NGN projects were finished there will be a lot of capacity overhead once again, and this will mean that companies like Huawei won’t have further European business to rely on in the medium term (as has happened in the past), he responded “I think everyone has learnt the lessons of the 1999/2000 era when big trans-continental fibre networks were rolled out by companies regardless of whether the need was really there. It is no longer a question of can it technically be done, but if there is customer demand for it.” “In my opinion there is no brick wall here. As long as there are good business models in place then there will continue to be new challenges to meet, and commercial rewards to be gained. Once NGN infrastructure is in place, there will be other aspects to address. We will have to add new services, and look at how to better integrate mobile communication into the network to allow quad-play, then there will be WiMAX, and other emerging technologies after that. The important thing is that the services are there. If customers can see the benefits they get from these services, they will be willing to pay for them and this will continue to drive further innovation in telecommunications.”
But despite Huawei’s upbeat attitude, some doubt it is getting the lion’s share of business in the transmission segment of 21CN. In the opinion of Gary Robinson, 21CN Project Manager at Livingston, it is yet to truly deliver. As he explains, “The activity levels we have seen so far, from the subcontractors working with us, as well as other industry data, suggest that early difficulties integrating its equipment has led to greater volumes of business being awarded to Ciena, the tandem transmission supplier for 21CN.” However he does add, “Indications are that Huawei has gone a long way to correcting this, and it is likely that more business will be heading its way shortly.”