UK firms cautious on BT 21CN promise
10 April 2008
UK firms cautious on BT 21CN promise
UK enterprise telecoms purchasers have little faith that incumbent carrier BT will deliver on its vision of the £10bn 21CN next generation communications network by 2011.
Naturally, the revelation is part of a mud slinging exercise by cable carrier rival, ntl:Telewest Business, which is part of the Virgin Media Group.
ntl:Telewest hired a research firm to interview 200 telecom and IT managers across businesses in the public sector, finance, retail and media markets. Surprisingly, only 60 per cent had actually heard of BT's 21CN project, which will see the carrier replace its legacy nationwide network with next generation technologies.
Perhaps less surprisingly, just 27 per cent of respondents believe BT will deliver the project on schedule, and nearly 40 per cent believe that BT will be one to five years late in switching all of its customers over from its legacy network.
When quizzed about what BT was promising with its next generation network, 61 per cent of network purchasers said improved network speed. However, just 35 per cent cited increased efficiencies, 27 per cent believed it would improve networked IT services, 18 per cent identified true convergence for voice and data services, and just 2 per cent believed it would enable a mobile workforce.
By comparison, when respondents were questioned over which technological enhancements their company would most benefit from by switching to a next generation network, enough bandwidth was ranked the number one benefit with 86 per cent, followed by availability of voice, data and video on any device at any time with 67 per cent. While sharing content across a user's work phone, personal phone, PDA and computer scored third with 63 per cent.
Good news for ntl:Telewest is that around 55 per cent of IT managers considered the availability of a next generation network to be an important telecoms purchasing consideration and 35 per cent of companies said they would consider switching to a next generation network that is available today, rather than waiting for BT's 21CN network. ntl:Telewest claims that it already offers a next generation network.
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