Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) has signed a major five-year agreement with BT for an evolution of its 21st Century Network (21CN), the foundation of BT’s IP transformation to enhance customer experience and accelerate time-to-market for next generation services. Leveraging Alcatel-Lucent’s High Leverage NetworkTM (HLN) architecture and transformational services, this project will further evolve BT’s infrastructure, enabling the company to expedite network convergence, increase capacity and deliver content cost effectively as it prepares to introduce new video-rich services to an expanded base of wholesale and retail subscribers.

While allowing its customers in more than 170 countries to benefit from the development of 21CN, this contract will specifically help BT to build up its infrastructure to continue to play a leading role in strengthening the UK’s leadership in communications by increasing performance, capacity and bandwidth to a broader customer base.

"21CN is a huge transformational programme. It’s about providing a network for the future which requires a game-changing approach," said George Nazi, managing director, BT 21CN Core Convergence. "Alcatel-Lucent came up with an innovative solution that will help us keep 21CN at the forefront of innovation and radical change."

With video-rich content consumption booming, it has become critical to accelerate the transition to a unified smart IP network and to an open application environment that enables new business models. With this network evolution, BT is striving to increase revenues and reduce costs while migrating to new and more profitable business models.

"BT’s 21CN is one of the most complete, exciting and ambitious business transformation programmes anywhere in the global telecommunications industry," said Lakh Jemmett, Vice President, Alcatel-Lucent North Europe. "We are proud that our High Leverage Network architecture is enabling BT to transform their business, transform their networks, and deliver powerful new services in a scalable, cost-effective way."

In support of its HLN vision, and in alignment with BT’s business drivers, Alcatel-Lucent will provide an innovative end-to-end transport solution which tightly integrates IP and optical transport resources along with professional services such as project management, design, installation and commissioning, repair and return and software updates which will help BT manage the rapid growth in network traffic, while substantially cutting operational and maintenance costs.

As BT’s residential subscriber base and associated bandwidth demands continue to grow, and in preparation for new rich-media services, BT is also evolving its residential IP service delivery architecture. Broadband Network Gateways (BNGs), previously centralized and becoming an increasing bottleneck in the network, will be distributed closer to subscribers using next generation service routers. This will result in an increase in capacity and performance creating a better end-user experience. Additionally, as the BNG function runs on the same routing platform as BT’s business services, operations are streamlined and simplified for the operator.

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