The family of BNS-2000 products consists of several data switches among which are the Datakit II VCS and BNS-2000. Datakit VCS, the predecessor for Datakit II VCS, was the world’s first cell-based, virtual circuit switch (VCS). It was conceived in the late 1970’s by AT&T Bell Laboratories, and started its initial deployment in the early 1980’s and was the most successful data networking product of AT&T/Western Electric/Lucent Technologies in the 1980s and 1990s. Datakit VCS evolved into the Datakit II VCS and BNS-2000 switches. Deployment of the expanded product family continued until the late 1990’s, reaching sale total of nearly 1.5 billion dollars. It was installed in all the major US telephone companies and several companies in Europe and Southeast Asia. Approximately, 60% of the switching nodes and associated data networking are still in active service today.
The primary purpose of Datakit-based networks is to provide an out-of-band network for the functions of provisioning, control, surveillance, and trouble-shooting of the telephone voice network switching and transmission equipment, the connected voice and signaling trunks, and the subscriber telephone lines. Operation support system programs running on various AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX hosts and technicians still access the voice and transmission equipment to perform the four functions through the Datakit networks. In addition, the Datakit family of products was deployed commercially to provide data network connectivity for a national bank, a car rental agency, state lottery, and other projects.
Datakit networks still remain today as the critical element in support of the telephone voice network. ZT Technology Solutions, through its partner Datatek Applications, provides support for the product family, including Remote Technical Support and sparing. Lucent discontinued support of this product in 1998 and Datatek was created to continue the on-going current engineering and support. ZT Technology Solutions can provide Datakit technical support and sparing in order to keep the Datakit networks running. ZT can also provide technical planning for the migration of a Datakit network transparently to a modern IP network, but at the same time maintain the legacy interfaces to the voice switches and transmission equipment.
____________________________________________________
Datakit II VCS is a registered trademark of Alcatel-Lucent Inc.
AIX is a trademark of IBM.
Solaris is a registered trademark of Oracle, Inc.
HP-UX is a registered trademark of Hewlett Packard, Inc.
© Copyright 2018. All Rights Reserved ZT Technology Solutions