12 July 2002 -- Liquidators have sold the first parts of bankrupt Amsterdam-based KPNQwest's network. Stockholm-based Telia's subsidiary, Telia International Carrier (Telia IC), has extended its 40,000 route-km multi-duct Viking Network - which connects 50 major cities in Europe and the USA through 120 points of presence - by acquiring the assets of KPNQwest's French subsidiary for about Euro3m.
The assets include a duct-based network between Paris-Lille and Paris-Kehl (southwest Germany) and a metro ring in Paris. It will also include the routes Paris-Lyon-Marseille-Turin-Milan, Lyon-Geneva and Lille-Calais, if current third-party maintenance suppliers "provide conditions at market rates". Telia wants them to agree to lower fees than negotiated with KPNQwest, since market prices have fallen since the contracts were signed.
"This investment represents a few percent of our annual investment budget and will give us a significant presence in one of Europe's most telecom-intensive regions," says president Erik Heilborn. Telia had already inherited many of KPNQwest's clients.
Telia is pressing for an open auction of KPNQwest's remaining assets. KPNQwest's lender banks had hoped to extract most of the remaining Euro220m they are owed by selling most of the 25,000km network to one buyer.
* Telia AB is to expand the capacity of its Telia International Carrier unit's European IP backbone network. It will do this by using Ericsson's IP core backbone routers based on Juniper Networks Inc's new T640 Internet Routing Node, as part of its verified and pre-tested Packet Backbone Network (PBN) carrier-class data backbone.
The solutions feature highly scalable IP platforms, enabling rapid delivery of new value-added services in an interoperable, multi-service network environment, and include: the AXI 540 series Edge Aggregation Routers, AXD Multiservice Switches, and AXI 590, AXI 580 and AXI 520 series IP Backbone Routers (based on Juniper Networks' T- and M-series routers).
The T640 router provides throughput speeds of 640Gbit/s. Ericsson will start deployingthe T640s in August within the US-Europe IP backbone network implemented in 2001 at Telia IC.
"With this combined Ericsson/Juniper carrier-class backbone implementation, we are building upon our solid backbone structure in a natural way, getting the necessary capacity and flexibility to handle the increasing data traffic effectively," says Telia IC head Erik Heilborn.