January 25, 2006 Alameda, CA -- UTStarcom, a provider of IP-based, end-to-end networking platforms and services, has announced contract wins with RailTel of India Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Indian Railways, and with Chunghwa Telecom, a leading telecom service provider in Taiwan.
According to a press release, UTStarcom will supply its NetRing 600 and 2500 optical transport platforms to RailTel, which oversees a nationwide Indian railway network of more than 10,000 km. of track and approximately 11,000 trains per day. RailTel is implementing an optical, fiber-based broadband telecom long haul as well as access network with new-generation optical networking systems. According to the companies, the desired network aims to accommodate the growing demand for bandwidth, while maintaining compatibility and enhanced flexibility to transport and route all traffic types.
"India boasts one of the oldest, busiest and largest railway networks in the world, one that caters to the most remote areas of the country," remarks Vijay Yadav, managing director of South Asia at UTStarcom. "UTStarcom's NetRing platform is designed to help cost effectively expand the internal communication network of Indian Railways, principally in the northern, western, and southern parts of the country. In doing so, it intends to create a flexible, nationwide network for providing managed voice, video, and data services in India to ISPs and telcos along the railway route in even the most remote locations."
Seperately, UTStarcom announced an agreement to supply its NetRing 10000 multiservice optical transport products to Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom Co., for an expansion of the service provider's network. The provider says it intends to use the NetRing platform to deliver high-density, high-speed broadband services, including voice, data, and video, to subscribers throughout Taiwan in support of its MultiMedia on Demand (MOD) service.
"This announcement represents an expansion on a contract the two companies announced in May 2004, bringing the total dollar amount in contracts with Chunghwa Telecom to approximately $40 million in just over one year," comments Joe Ye, general manager of UTStarcom Taiwan. "Our NetRing product is an ideal solution for operators like Chunghwa who want to offer multiple services off the same platform, be it voice, data, or video, without fear of service efficiency or aggregation issues."
UTStarcom says its NetRing product line provides aggregation, grooming, cross-connect, and transport functionality to deliver high-density, highly efficient STM-1 to STM-16, PDH (E1/DS1, E3/DS3), Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and ATM services in SDH-based carrier networks. All systems are designed to support full redundancy, multiple protection options, and in- service upgrades, according to the company. The company says its NetRing product family is based on a distributed architecture that combines add-drop multiplexing (ADM), digital cross-connect system (DCS), and Ethernet switching functionality into an integrated, "pay-as-you-grow" multi- service system.
The company says its NetRing optical products are among the first designed to support virtual concatenation, based on relevant ITU standards. According to the company, with this functionality, carriers can have provisioning granularity in any STS/VC increment, dramatically improving Ethernet/IP transport efficiency across SDH networks. The company says the products are designed to support advanced EoS protocols, such as Generic Framing Procedure (GFP), 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.
The NetRing 600, 2500, and 10000 products comply with ETSI telecom standards for SDH deployment.