In today's (Sunday) city comment the Torygraph shows that its journalists really don't understand the Telecom sector at all. Mind you I don't see this as limited to the Torygraph - the fatc that the entire City of London from pissed hacks to would-be financial wizards talked about TMT as a stock category (TMT = Technology, Media, Telecoms) should be enough of a hint.
The Torygraph seems to think that BT's decision not to chose Marconi to be an equipment provider for its 21CN network is something that can be generalized to BT thinks "all UK telecom manufacturers are crap" and thence to "the entire world thinks all UK telecom manufacturers are crap". As someone who works in that industry I'll let you into a little secret - Marconi is crap. It may have a couple of decent products but in the main it is a grab bag of products assembled from various (mostly expensive stock based) acquisitions that don't share much in common and aren't anythign specila in terms of their capabilities. Other UK telecom equipment providers may or may not be crap but whether or not they are has nothing to do with Marconi and vice versa. Of course the Torygraph rather lacks any clue about UK technology firms anyway - for example ARM, a UK success in anyone's book, appears to be unmentioned during the last month despite it releasing some pretty good interim results - so this should not be too surprising.
The Torygraph also seems to labour under the quaint idea that If I were building a network today I too would not buy equipment from multiple vendors but chose one or two. The reason for this is "interoperability" - or the fact that most vendor's kit only works well with other kit from the same vendor or from a large incumbent player (such as Cisco, Nortel). Awarding a network 30% to company A, 20% to company B etc. is to set yourself up for a nightmare in technical support issues. The only reason why you would let a minor player like Marconi in is if they had a product with a compelling advantage that would help counter the interoperabiltiy challenge. Since Marconi's products are nothing special it is no surprise that BT would decide that it doesn't need to maintain its links with Marconi when BT is trying to build a new network that is cheaper to operate than its current ones.