Infinera selected by The Carphone Warehouse for nationwide UK network
DECEMBER 19, 2007 -- European mobile phone retailer and Internet service provider The Carphone Warehouse has selected Infinera (search for Infinera) for its national backbone network in the United Kingdom.
Infinera says its Digital Optical Network will allow The Carphone Warehouse to deliver the capacity and services needed by its rapidly growing customer base of residential and business broadband users, as well as supporting the company's strategic objective of becoming the UK's leading alternate fixed line provider.
The Carphone Warehouse decided last year to build its own nationwide backbone network to carry data and voice traffic for its growing customer base. The Carphone Warehouse says it selected Infinera as the optical platform for the network because of many key features, including flexibility, speed, and cost-effectiveness.
"The Carphone Warehouse has one of the most aggressive growth plans of any service provider in the world today," claims Neil McArthur, CEO of The Carphone Warehouse Networks. "We chose Infinera for our national backbone because it allows us to achieve far better economics and scale. More importantly, it gives us control of our own destiny when it comes to rolling out high-capacity, high-quality services when and where our customers need them."
Infinera says its Digital Optical Network enables The Carphone Warehouse to deliver any service to any point on its network without the need for expensive and time-consuming optical fine-tuning. Infinera's interchangeable tributary modules provide the flexibility to add new services or quickly change the services provisioned on existing line-side capacity, add company representatives.
Infinera says its networks offer industry-leading speed of service delivery due to the digital architecture and the software intelligence in the Infinera IQ network operating system. Speed of installation and speed of adding new services are critical success factors for The Carphone Warehouse, which is supporting a rapidly-growing customer base and a customer base that is rapidly embracing new applications such as the delivery of television programming in new and more consumer-friendly forms.
The Infinera network also enables The Carphone Warehouse to reap the benefits of a nationwide network with optical capacity in 100 Gbit/sec increments. The Infinera DTN delivers 100 Gbits/sec of optical capacity on every line card, compared to just 10 Gbits/sec or 40 Gbits/sec from competitor optical systems, says the company. In addition, the simplicity of installation and operation of Infinera's digital networks means that an Infinera network can be operated by a significantly smaller engineering staff than required by traditional DWDM networks.
For The Carphone Warehouse Networks' head of transmission Paul Jackson, the ability to deploy the Infinera network without hiring a large team of optical transmission specialists was a key advantage. "An Infinera Digital Optical Network can be planned, installed, and operated with speed and simplicity comparable to an IP network," says Jackson.
"We considered conventional optical gear from other vendors, but the operating costs alone would have been a show-stopper," he adds. "Infinera's digital architecture allows us to deliver the capacity we need without creating additional layers of complexity in our network. The embedded GMPLS software intelligence also allows us to extend our existing MPLS capabilities across the optical core--and that's still at the PowerPoint stage for most other optical vendors," he contends.
Founded in London in 1989, The Carphone Warehouse claims to be the world's largest independent retailer of mobile phones, with 2,337 retail stores in 11 countries, including 786 in the UK. After launching residential landline telephone service in the UK in 2003, The Carphone Warehouse says it "shook up" the industry in April 2006 when it launched free TalkTalk broadband, which offered British residential households broadband Internet service, unlimited nationwide voice service, and unlimited international landline calls to 28 countries, all for $43.45 per month.
"Broadband is a right, not a privilege," said The Carphone Warehouse CEO Charles Dunstone at the launch. Last year, The Carphone Warehouse acquired AOL's UK customer base for residential broadband.
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