NETWORK
The Carphone Warehouse (LSE:CPW), Europe's leading mobile
phone retailer and one of the UK's leading Internet service
providers, has selected Infinera (Nasdaq:INFN) for its national backbone
network in the United Kingdom. Infinera's 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.
Service, Speed and Flexibility
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 has 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," said 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."
The Infinera 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. Infinera networks offer industry-leading speed of
service delivery due to the digital architecture and the software
intelligence in the Infinera IQ(tm) 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 which is rapidly
embracing new applications such as the delivery of television
programming in new and more consumer-friendly forms.
"Broadband is a Right"
Founded in London in 1989, The Carphone Warehouse is the
world's largest independent retailer of mobile phones, with 2337
retail stores in 11 countries, including 786 in the UK. The Carphone
Warehouse's revenue for the six months to September 2007 was 2.14
billion pounds sterling ($4.43 billion). After launching residential
landline telephone service in the UK in 2003, The Carphone Warehouse
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 20.99 pounds
($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. Last month, The Carphone Warehouse reported it
had 2.5 million broadband subscribers, making it Britain's
third-largest Internet service provider.
Army of Engineers Not Required
The Infinera network also enables The Carphone Warehouse to reap
the benefits of a cost-effective nationwide network with optical
capacity in 100 Gigabit/second (Gb/s) increments. The Infinera DTN
delivers 100 Gb/s of optical capacity on every line card, compared to
just 10 Gb/s or 40 Gb/s from competitor optical systems. 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,"
said Mr. Jackson. "We considered conventional optical gear from
other vendors, but the operating costs alone would have been a
show-stopper. 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."
"We're delighted that The Carphone Warehouse has selected
Infinera for its national backbone," said Infinera CEO Jagdeep
Singh. "The Carphone Warehouse is an ambitious company with
aggressive growth plans, and willing to think out of the box to solve
problems and deliver new services to its customers, and these are
characteristics that we can identify with very strongly."
The Infinera DTN is a Digital ROADM for long-haul and metro core
networks, combining high-capacity DWDM transport, integrated digital
bandwidth management, and GMPLS-powered service intelligence in a single
platform.
About Infinera
Infinera provides Digital Optical Networking systems to
telecommunications carriers worldwide. Infinera's systems are
unique in their use of a breakthrough semiconductor technology: the
Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC). Infinera's systems and PIC
technology are designed to provide optical networks with simpler
engineering and operations, faster time-to-service, and more flexible
networking.
For more information, visit www.infinera.com or call 408/572-5213.
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