Vietnam Post and Telecommunications (VNPT), the country’s dominant carrier, is using a Nortel optical solution to double the capacity of its national optical backbone and meet accelerating demand for high-bandwidth video, mobile and broadband services.
By upgrading its 3,000 km north-south optical transmission network from 20 Gbps to 40 Gbps, VNPT will be able to provide ADSL broadband access to more residential and enterprise customers and deliver quality teleconferencing capabilities for business. As well, VNPT’s network will handle increased mobile traffic for wireless operators and create a platform for its planned migration to VoIP.
“This project is extremely important to Vietnam’s rapidly growing telecommunications market,” said Bui Thien Minh, vice president, VNPT. “This latest expansion of our national backbone, which Nortel originally built and has since upgraded, will allow us to respond swiftly and confidently to the pressing demand of customers for increased bandwidth. Now, with the seamless simplicity of high-speed connectivity, we can empower our customers with an unprecedented range of advanced communications services and capabilities.”
“Upgrading Vietnam’s national backbone to increase the speed of transmission services, grow the availability of broadband Internet access, and enable high-bandwidth business and communications applications is going to make the concept of Business Made Simple a reality for VNPT’s customers,” said James Demers, vice president, ASEAN, Nortel. “This doubling of network capacity is going to simplify doing business by removing the barriers that now limit access to services.”
Nortel and VNPT have had a long and successful business relationship. In 1995 Nortel built the original optical backbone – the country’s first optical DWDM network at 2.5 Gbps – running from Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City in the south with interconnections into the national network for major cities along the route. In 2003, Nortel upgraded the national backbone to 20 Gbps.
The Nortel high-capacity transport solution for VNPT comprises the Optical Long Haul 1600 with the Optical Cross Connect DX for cost-effective DWDM transport, and the Optical Metro 4000 series of multiservice SDH platforms to enable 10 Gbps connectivity into and from cities along the backbone’s north-south path.
Nortel leads the industry in the design and building of optical networks for both service provider and enterprise customers, with more than 360,000 optical network elements deployed in more than 1,000 customer networks in 65 countries. For full year 2006, Nortel was ranked #1 in the metro WDM market, continuing its undisputed lead for the eighth consecutive year, according to the Dell’Oro Group.