Opal Telecom, the Carphone Warehouse’s subsidiary responsible for administering its TalkTalk voice offering, is aiming to beat BT's 21CN to the punch by launching its own Next Generation Network (NGN) first:

Opal Telecom announced on Tuesday that Sonus Networks is supplying the foundation for its forthcoming IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)-based network. Clive Dorsman, Opal’s technical director and chief NGN architect, told journalists at an event to mark the occasion: "We’ll be ahead of [BT] by a long way".

Claiming that Opal’s network was "deployed, live and carrying customer traffic today," he said his company’s equipment was being installed in between 10 and 15 BT exchanges daily.

"We’re targeting exchanges where a high concentration of customers currently are," Dorsman continued. He stated that Opal’s target was 1,000 IMS-enabled exchanges by the first quarter of 2007 and predicted that half of TalkTalk’s customers would be migrated into the new network within a year.

We can't help but feel that NGN has become an abused term, seemingly used when referring to all manors of different technologies and adapted by operators to mean what they feel it should (sounds like the definition of broadband all over again).

In the meantime one of the wheels on my car needs changing and I feeling like having one with special grip for tight corners, hence forth I shall call this wheel the 'Next Generation Tyre'. More @ ZDNet.