April 19, 2006 Ottawa, Canada and Seoul, Korea -- KT Corp., the former Korea Telecom, and Meriton Networks announced the deployment of KT's intelligent WDM (I-WDM) network, which employs Meriton's Agile Optical Networking (AON) architecture and is designed to allow KT to meet "explosive growth" in its optical network, while providing network agility to cost-effectively support future broadband service developments.
With the equipment in its existing networks quickly approaching capacity limits, and increasing demand for high-speed Internet and multimedia services among its customers, KT says it required a flexible network infrastructure capable of demand-driven expansion. The provider says it required an inherently scalable infrastructure capable of supporting all types of services and network topologies, including ring, ring-to-ring and mesh, while incorporating capabilities such as wavelength translation and wavelength switching. KT says it was also critical that its network provide redundancy on all components and links for protection against any network or equipment failures that might occur.
After a thorough review of vendor offerings and a rigorous test process, KT says it selected the Meriton AON platform because it best met all scalability and flexibility requirements for the provider's next generation infrastructure. The KT I-WDM network employs the Meriton 7200 optical switching platform (OSP) and 8600 network management system (NMS) to automate rapid provisioning of optical services. With the Meriton AON-based infrastructure, KT says it can quickly react to and accommodate its customers' changing service and bandwidth needs.
"As Korea's leading provider of communications services, we pride ourselves in offering our customers the latest, most advanced communications solutions, quickly, efficiently, cost-effectively, and with the highest level of reliability," comments Mr. Kim Yong Soo, assistant vice president of the transmission department within KT's network group. "Meriton's AON architecture gives us the scalability and flexibility we need to offer the most innovative services while continuing to meet our customers' exacting reliability expectations and our own internal cost requirements."
"As a Tier 1 service provider, KT is seeing phenomenal broadband growth, which is driving the need for additional capacity in its metro network," concludes Mike Pascoe, president and CEO of Meriton Networks. "We are thrilled that our AON solution is helping KT solve this critical business and technical challenge."