June 1, 2006 Paris -- SaskTel, one of Canada's most progressive full service communications companies, has selected Alcatel's triple-play portfolio to enhance its Internet and entertainment services across the province of Saskatchewan. The value of the project is CDN$ 35 million, and deployment will begin in the second quarter of 2006.
SaskTel's Max Entertainment Services currently include high-speed Internet access, television, radio and music channel access, as well as Video-on-Demand (VoD). SaskTel will deploy Alcatel's IP portfolio and access equoment as part of its Next Generation Access Infrastructure initiative to provide bandwidth of up to 40 Mbits/sec and enable new services such as high-definition TV (HDTV) and voice-over-IP (VoIP).
In addition, the Alcatel equipment will enable SaskTel to converge its business and consumer services onto a single next-generation IP infrastructure, allowing the service provider to achieve economies of scale and maximize the profitability of services, say Alcatel representatives. In order to profitably meet the needs of urban and rural customers dispersed over a wide geography, SaskTel's network infrastructure must delivering a broad menu of advanced services in a cost-optimized and scalable manner.
Collapsing existing overlay networks onto a consolidated IP infrastructure will enable SaskTel to offer enhanced triple-play services as well as IP-based enterprise services such as VPN, transparent LAN, and VoIP.
"By leveraging Alcatel's IP and broadband technology, SaskTel can offer even more advanced business and entertainment services to our customers," contends Robert Watson, president and CEO of SaskTel. "Implementing Alcatel's leading-edge solutions gives us the business and technology tools we need to compete and to offer subscribers a full slate of converged services--everything from high-definition TV to VPN to VoIP."
The Alcatel offering includes its 7750 Service Router and 7450 Ethernet Service Switch, and will be managed by the Alcatel 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM). SaskTel will also deploy the Alcatel 7330 ISAM fiber-to-the-node (FTTN), which supports VDSL2 technology to address high-bandwidth applications such as HDTV. The Alcatel 5526 Access Management System (AMS) will provide remote network support, provisioning, database backup, and performance monitoring. SaskTel also will deploy Alcatel's iNSIGHT Service Assurance to provide end-to-end customer service assurance across the entire network.
The contract further reinforces the partnership between SaskTel and Alcatel, which already supplied its IP/MPLS, optical, and access equipment as well as its middleware platform for TV services.