BT to buy Infonet for US$965mil
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BERLIN: BT Group Plc, Britain&#39;s largest phone company, plans to buy Infonet Services Corp. for US$965mil to add a data network spanning more than 180 countries.
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NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Shares of DigitalNet Holdings (DNET) soared $6.24, or 26.5 percent to $29.80 in early trading Monday after it agreed to be acquired by UK group BAE Systems for around $600 million, including the assumption of $93.
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(InfoWorld) - More than 100 consumers in the U.K. village of Wick are among the first customers to be connected to BT Group's next-generation telecommunications network, which went live Tuesday. The BT 21st Century Network, dubbed 21CN, is one of the most ambitious network overhauls of its kind in the world. Instead of using traditional circuit-switched systems to transport phone calls, the U.K. operator is switching its entire networking infrastructure to IP (Internet Protocol) technology. The move to an all-IP network will allow BT to offer consumers and businesses "triple-play" voice, data and video services over a single ADSL2+ (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) broadband connection, at speeds up to 24Mbps. Among the new services supported by the network are VOIP (voice over IP) and IPTV. At the same time, the move will allow the operator to lower operating costs. It expects to save around Â£1 billion ($1.9 billion) per year as a result of the network overhaul. Total cost of the overhaul is estimated at Â£10 billion. By mid-2007, BT plans to have switched more than 350,000 lines to its next-generation network, according BT spokeswoman Anna Easton. "We aim to use the first phase as a learning period," she said. The operator aims to have "the bulk" of the country's 30 million lines converted to IP by the end the decade, Easton said. As part of its carrier wholesale operations, BT will resell capacity over its new network to around 400 telecommunications service providers in the country. 21CN is an advanced IP broadband network system based on intelligent systems, such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), which allows the service provider to control the communications activity to meet a customer's requirements, and MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching), which enables the efficient designation and routing of IP traffic flows. BT launched its 21CN project around three years ago, according to Easton.
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BT Group is poised for a surprise return to the US market with a planned US$1 billion acquisition of Infonet Services, a California-based telecom service provider.
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(InfoWorld) - Even if an 11-year-old school girl from the tiny village of Wick in South Wales was the first person to place a call over BT Group'sÂ new next-generation network, U.K. businesses will be among the big benefactors of the all-IP (Internet Protocol) network. "We're moving toward giving far more empowerment to our corporate customers," said Neil Rogers, managing director of BT's 21st Century Network (21CN) project. "We want to give them more visibility and control of what's happening on the network." The 21CN project is one of the most ambitious network overhauls of its kind in the world. BT is replacing its 16 legacy voice and data networks with a new network built entirely on IP technology. On Tuesday, Laura Wess became the first 21CN user when she made a call from her school, which BT selected as the launching pad for its new network. The move to an all-IP network will allow BT to offer consumers and small businesses "triple-play" voice, data and video services over a single ADSL2+ (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) broadband connection, at speeds up to 24Mbps. Among the new services supported by the network are VOIP (voice over IP) and IPTV. The next-generation network will also allow BT to offer a far more flexible service to enterprise customers. "Today, the managed service contracts we offer are very manually intensive at the front end," Rogers said. "Even though we try to integrate our operating systems with the front-end premises systems of our customers, we still find the process to be very labor-intensive. Our all-IP approach gives us much more flexibility." Resilience -- the ability to recover from network hiccups -- and security are two additional features of 21CN that should interest corporate customers, according to Rogers. Because BT has chosen to build a completely new IP network from scratch instead of adding an IP overlay over its legacy systems, the operator has been able to design resilience and security into the network from the very beginning. Although Rogers sees little room for BT to lower prices as a result of the network overhaul, he expects the new network to give the operator greater flexibility in how it charges customers. "More attractive pricing is quite difficult in the U.K., where prices are already very aggressive," Rogers said. "But we plan to be more flexible in our pricing, for instance by charging for services as opposed to physical capacity or even allowing customers to pay on-demand for some services." Testing has proved among the biggest challenges of the next-generation rollout, according to Rogers. "It's been a huge effort to test network interoperability and customer premises equipment," he said. "It's an ongoing challenge." Although some experts have questioned whether BT's choice of ADSL2+ technology to link homes and small businesses could someday become a bottleneck for services requiring speeds higher than 24Mbps, Rogers said the technology offers sufficient bandwidth for the operator's planned high-speed services for the next four to five years. "At some point, we'll look at local fiber deployment," Rogers said. "At the moment, however, there's no business case for fiber in the U.K."
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Smiths Group is to buy Medex, a US healthcare company, for $925m (Â£477m), including $300m of debt, in the biggest deal for the UK engineering conglomerate since the merger of Smiths and TI Group in 2000.
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BT Group, the privatised former British telecoms monopoly, has sold its entire holding in the French satellite operator Eutelsat for Â£363m.
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UK telecoms giant BT offers to open its network to rivals and cut prices in an effort to head off a possible break-up.
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Britain's BAE Systems said it had agreed to buy DigitalNet Holdings Inc, a provider of computer networks for the US government, for 600 million dollars (489 million euros) in cash.
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Mobile phone giant Vodafone Group   VOD.L confirmed on Monday its plan to enter Britain's   cut-throat fixed-line broadband Internet market via a deal with   the wholesale arm of telecoms firm BT Group BT.L.
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LONDON  - Reuters, the British news and data provider, said it had agreed to buy US financial information firm Moneyline Telerate for 175 million dollars.
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Cisco Systems has confirmed that it is to buy routing software start-up BCN Systems for an initial $34 million (Â£17.6 million). In the week it turned 20, the networking giant announced it will pay around
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LOS ANGELES -- Britain&#39;s largest fixed-line telephone company, BT Group PLC, agreed to acquire El Segundo, Calif.,-based Infonet Services Corp.
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In the latest of a flurry of deals among internet service providers, UK firm Claranet buys the UK operations of US business Via.Net Works for Â£7.3m.
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IBM , the world's largest  information technology company, on Thursday said it agreed to  buy FileNet  for $1.6 billion, its third  software-related purchase announcement in a week.
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BT Group has extended an existing human resources outsourcing deal with Accenture with a new 10-year contract valued at Â£306 million ($576 million), the companies announced Wednesday. The deal will begin in August and will cover BT's HR functions in 38 countries for all of its 97,000 employees and 180,000 BT pensioners. The previous five-year outsourcing contract only covered employees in the U.K. Accenture will provide services such as customer contact, recruitment, pension administration, payroll, and benefits administration. The business process outsourcing (BPO) contract with London-based BT also has a consulting, or what companies like IBM are increasingly calling "transformation," element to it. As part of its consulting role, Accenture will create a "transition program" with BT before the August roll-out of the contract.
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In the latest of a flurry of deals among net providers, Claranet buys the UK wing of US business Via.Net Works.