Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. has scored something of a coup by signing up former BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA) group technology officer Mick Reeve as an advisor and public representative.

Reeve, who retired from BT in May this year, was one of the British carrier's best known and most respected executives, with a wealth of knowledge and experience of network infrastructure and OSS. He has also been an influential mover and shaker in industry standards bodies such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and TM Forum . (See TMF Tackles Software Procurement and OSS Firms Jump on IMS.)

He is also already very familiar with Huawei, one of eight leading vendors involved in the build-out of BT's £10 billion (US$18.8 billion) 21CN next-generation network. (See BT Closes 21CN Deals, Touts IPTV and Huawei Signs 21CN.)

Now Reeve is taking that wealth of knowledge into the market and is acting as a strategic advisor to Huawei. He'll be part of the Chinese vendor's team heading into next week's Broadband World Forum Europe in Paris, where a meeting with Light Reading is scheduled.

Huawei is not the only vendor benefiting from Reeve's experience and contact book. (See Genband Names Advisors.)

Reeve has been particularly outspoken in recent years about the challenges carriers face when building out their next-generation networks, and was part of the team that worked on the design of 21CN. (See BT Guru Picks Holes in NGNs and Aggregation Aggravation.)

In his final months at BT, he was one of the executives championing PBT (provider backbone transport), the controversial new approach to Ethernet tunneling being pushed heavily by Nortel Networks Ltd. . (See BT Likes Nortel's New Ethernet Flavor.)

PBT has been raising the blood pressure of many an industry executive in recent months, and has sparked a healthy debate on Light Reading's message boards about the pros and cons of Ethernet and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). (See BT Rethinks 21CN Core Strategy.)

Light Reading understands that, with other vendors such as Siemens Communications Group already following Nortel's lead in PBT, Huawei is set to voice its support for the new flavor of Ethernet, though that couldn't be confirmed as this article was published.

— Ray Le Maistre, International News Editor, Light Reading