Industry sources have informed us BT will seek to select its short list of equipment vendors for the 21 CN RFP by March 31st (although some folks feel that might actually come in April, during their analyst call). There has been a lot written about BT's major next-gen network initiative, also known as the 21st Century Network (or 21 CN, for short) RFP. This ambitious undertaking calls for the building of a new network, followed by the switching off of older PSTN infrastructure by the end of decade, and is pegged at £10 billion ($18.7 billion). 

Companies in the running include Alcatel (access and Ethernet), Cisco (which might see some action involving its new CRS-1 core router and hopes to leverage its long standing relationship with BT), Fujitsu (DSLAMs), Marconi (which is a long-term supplier to BT, and one of the favorites to win a part of the VoIP buildout; there will be lots of lobbying for Marconi), and Siemens (one of BT's strategic suppliers, providing gear such as the HiPath next-gen line).  There could be also some companies which can benefit from partnerships to win a portion of this business, such as Sonus, which has a non-exclusive partnership with Marconi (if Marconi is one of the winners, it will leverage Sonus' gateway)

Nordic Wireless had an interesting post on the success of Japan's new polyphonic ring tones download service called “EZ Chaku-Uta-Full”. These polyphonic songs play 64 notes simultaneously and can be downloaded to mobile phones via 3G networks.  The service made its debut in mid-November of last year, and notched 1 million downloads within a span of 48 days: on January 5th, KDDI and Okinawa Cellular (a KDDI company) announced that milestone.  As of January, only KDDI was offering chaku-uta in Japan, with four handset models being supported and a base of 410,000 users.

What does this mean?  Can we have a future in which there will be more chaku-uta downloads on the wireless networks than i-Tunes downloads on the wired Internet?  Well, the graph below certainly suggests that, as the chaku-uta full service has had a much faster ramp-up.  One key takeaway is that for some applications, the mobile network might actually be the preferred means to get a service (particularly with the advent of HSDPA and burst data rates of up to 14.2 Mbps).  Another one is that the iPod will get more competition not only from Dell, Virgin, Creative Labs, IRiber and Archos, but also from cell phone manufacturers, which will embed mp3 functionality on their handsets and team up with service providers offering chaku-uta-like services.