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Sixteen equipment and software suppliers won 22 awards, which  were presented on December 11 at a ceremony in Hong Kong by eight service providers.

Executives from AT&T, BT, C&W, China Unicom, CSL, Hutchison Telecom, Orange Business Services, SmartTone Vodafone and Verizon Business were on hand to celebrate with the winners.

Huawei was named NGN Infrastructure Vendor of the Year (its second), Core Network Vendor of the Year and Optical Network Vendor of the Year.  NSN once again won Wireless Network Vendor of the Year and also picked up the Green Infrastructure Vendor of the Year award for its Flexi multiradio base station.

Both the Wireless Broadband Network Vendor of the Year and Best Infrastructure Management Vendor went to Ericsson. Cisco received honors for Broadband Network Vendor of the Year and Carrier Ethernet Vendor of the Year. ZTE went away with the IPTV Vendor of the Year prize, and Nortel Networks was VoIP Vendor of the Year for its continued leadership in the carrier VoIP segment.

The other winners were Amdocs (BSS), Oracle (OSS), Intec (Best Practices - BSS Vendor), Juniper Networks (metro networks), Ceragon Networks (microwave backhaul), Alvarion (Wimax), Alcatel-Lucent (FTTx), IBM (SDP) and Avaya (unified communications).

In addition to 20 Readers' Choice Awards, two Special Recognition Awards were presented. Most Innovative Vendor of the Year went to ZTE for what one nominating analyst said was its ability to "customize and be prepared to work with operators in ways many leading vendors are not." M-Commerce Innovation of the Year was won by Sybase 365 for its work with Celcom in Malyasia on AirCash, a mobile money transfer service.

This year's awards program was expanded from 17 to 22 categories to better cover the breadth of the ever-expanding telecom landscape. First-time winners this year include Amdocs, Avaya, Alvarion, Ceragon Networks, Juniper Networks and IBM.

CLICK HERE to view full online coverage of the awards and download the full PDF version