Sonus joins BT 21CN hype
Sonus’ patience with BT is finally bearing fruition. Sonus was clearly disappointed two years back when its partner Marconi failed to get a piece of the most hyped up NGN tender in history. BT instead went with Ericsson for the softswitching requirements. Now BT is not sure about the softswitch choice any more. It has awarded some of the VoIP access control business to Sonus. Obviously, that is what happens when you don’t buy iLocus reports.
Anyway, most of the control elements, the softswitching, the CSCFs …. that part of the BT 21CN tender was won by Ericsson. BT calls this the i-node. It seems that the i-node functionality has been chopped into pieces and Sonus will be taking care of what it calls the AGCF (Access Gateway Control Function). Bear in mind that access and core VoIP control functions were not split along IMS lines in the original tender. So Ericsson was pretty much the only call agent vendor.
However the bottom line is that BT 21CN project has not made any substantial progress yet. In fact some of the top management personnel looking after BT 21CN project have left BT recently, no doubt a result of slow progress and wrong vendor choices two years back. Marconi’s exclusion in particular must have raised a few eyebrows in the UK political circles back then.
