KPNQwest: top dog for European contract wins
- Added:
- Nov 30, 2001
According to BRC, in a series of bids made to European-based multinationals for managed data network contracts, AT&T and Infonet were the poorest performers with only 11% and 8% of their bids being successful.
By comparison, KPNQwest won 50%, Worldcom 43% and Equant 32%, while BT Ignite, Colt Telecom and Cable & Wireless lie in between the two groups. KPNQwest are starting to make serious inroads into the more established global suppliers including AT&T and Infonet, say BRC, due to “greater responsiveness to customer needs.”
The consultancy blames Equant's poorer performance on its period of integration with Global One.
The survey also shows that Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and IP VPNs - rather than frame relay architecture - are beginning to feature more prominently in procurement decisions. MPLS is a standards-based way of speeding up data traffic by specifying a path for a given packet sequence - identified by a label in each packet - cutting the time taken when a router checks which node to forward the packet to. MPLS usage is expected to rise as networks carry a greater volume and different mixes of traffic.