Marconi bags very local UK contracts

Marconi has won a four-year, £360m contract from BT and become one of the first providers of softswitch technology in the UK through a deal with Kingston Communications.

The BT contract covers cable services and covers civil engineering, pole renewal and underground duct work. It runs from 1 July.

While many of Marconi's recent wins have come from long-time customers - including BT - the infrastructure company has mounted something of a come back since its darkest days at the height of the telecoms downturn.

And while the BT deal may sound like the kind of business that was being done decades ago, the Kingston contract looks to the future. Soft switches, which rely on voice calls as well as data being routed over modern networks using internet protocol (IP), are a big growth area for all the main telecoms equipment manufacturers, despite replacing tens of traditional switches at a time.

Kingston said in a statement that the technology will allow a "new wave of IP-based business services driven by customer demand".