allowing end-user speeds exceeding 100 Mbit/s following future upgrades. Suppliers In April 2005, BT announced that it had selected eight suppliers for its 21CN roll-out. These were: Fujitsu – MSAN Huawei – MSAN and core optical Alcatel – metro Lucent – core MPLS, using Juniper components Cisco – metro and core MPLS Siemens – metro, using Juniper components Ciena – core optical Ericsson – iNode Alcatel and Lucent merged in December 2006 to form Alcatel-Lucent. The fact that Britain's Marconi received no major 21CN contract was a surprise to commentators and sent the company's shares tumbling. An example of analysis before BT's announcement is Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein's: "[Marconi is] so advanced with its products and so entrenched with BT Group plc that its selection looks certain." Criticism BT's plans for broadband internet access services were criticised. BT's main plan for providing Internet access was to upgrade their DSLAMs to ADSL2+ in the exchange. This was controversial because ADSL2+ was already an old technology and is limited to 24Mbit/s downstream, and would be even more dated by the time 21CN is completed. This led to criticisms that BT was not future proofing their network, since fibre, while more expensive to lay, is a lot more future-proof. Critics argue that fibre to the home would be more appropriate, which would mean replacing the current copper wire which supplies individual homes (the "last mile"). In late 2009, British ISP Andrews & Arnold reported severe issues with 21CN, citing multi-hour outages due to single points of failure and said that 21CN was not "fit for purpose" due to this and numerous other problems. 21CN's core technology of using VoIP has resulted in many problems with machine to machine communications - faxes, telemetry, alarm systems etc. These systems are much fussier than the human ear, and as such the conversion chain from analogue (between premises and local exchange) to 64 kbps digital, to VoIP and back again combined with IP routes of varying quality reduces the signal quality enough such that the devices at either end cannot communicate effectively. These problems are very difficult to fault find as any individual section of the call functions perfectly well; the effect only becomes apparent when all sections are joined together to make the end-to-end call. T38 fax promises to eliminate the fax issues (the fax is essentially sent as a JPEG with error correction), however the other