May 4, 2004 Alameda, CA-- UTStarcom announced a new contract valued at approximately $21.5 million with Taiwan service provider Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. Chunghwa will employ UTStarcom's NetRing multi-service optical transport products, which were announced in Q4 2003, to deliver high density, high speed broadband services, including voice, data, and video, to subscribers throughout Taiwan. Under the terms of the contract, UTStarcom will provide the optical equipment and Siemens will handle installation, maintenance, and third-party services.
"UTStarcom has developed a reputation as a worldwide leader in wireless and wireline access," said Joe Ye, general manager of UTStarcom in Taiwan. "The NetRing product diversifies our access solution portfolio and is designed to give our carrier customers room to substantially grow their subscriber bases for voice, data, and video services, without having to worry about problems of service efficiency."
Chunghwa, which currently has more than three million ADSL broadband subscribers, recently introduced a broadband multimedia on demand (MOD) application, which attracted more than 30,000 subscribers in the first month. Use of UTStarcom's NetRing products will enable the company to expand its broadband applications and help reach the goal of six million subscribers set by the Taiwan government.
NetRing products provide aggregation, grooming, cross-connect, and transport to deliver high density, highly efficient STM-1 to STM-64, PDH (E1, E3), Fast Ethernet, and Gigabit Ethernet services in SDH-based carrier networks. All systems support full-redundancy, multiple protection options, and in-service upgrades.
The NetRing product family is based on a distributed architecture that combines ADM , digital crossconnect system, and Ethernet switching functionality into an integrated, "pay-as-you-grow" multi- service system.
The NetRing optical solutions are among the first to support virtual concatenation, based on relevant ITU standards. With this functionality, carriers can have provisioning granularity in any STS/VC increment, dramatically improving Ethernet/IP transport efficiency across SDH networks. NetRing products support advanced Ethernet over SDH protocols, such as generic framing procedure, which provides standards-based data encapsulation for efficient mapping of a wide variety of data protocols, including Ethernet, ESCON, FICON, Fibre Channel, and digital video into SDH. Built-in Ethernet management functionality enables carriers to apply traffic shaping and limiting policies on a per-port or per-traffic-flow basis for point-to-point Ethernet, Ethernet aggregation, layer 2 switching, and Ethernet VLAN applications. Statistical multiplexing capability allows native Ethernet/data switching and oversubscription.
NetRing 600, 2500, and 10000 products comply with European Telecommunications Standards Institute standards for SDH deployment.