VoIP News: ECI Telecom and SK Group, St. George Bank and Nortel, E-Plus and VoIP

By DAVID SIMS

TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

ECI Telecom today announced that SK Group, Korea's third largest conglomerate and one of the leading business organizations in Asia, has once again selected VoIP vendor ECI Telecom's optical products for a nationwide expansion of its long-haul DWDM backbone network.

The deal is part of an ongoing relationship between SK Group and ECI Telecom. ECI's products will, according to ECI officials, "enable SK Group to provide affordable, high-speed 3G services and e-government applications in South Korea."

The contract is expected to exceed $20 million over the next five years.

This new nationwide backbone will include 33 nodes covering all of South Korea reaching more than 1,200 km. SK's network will be managed by LightSoft, an industry network management software systems.

St. George, Australia's fifth largest bank and a top 15 Australian Stock Exchange company, has deployed a high-speed Nortel network to provide more reliable communications between its head office and business continuity sites.

The new network replaces the bank's legacy data network and was chosen from a list of competing vendors following a comprehensive tender and trial process conducted last year.

"As part of our customer experience development we launched a CRM project in Q4 2005 that required an overhaul of our existing network to function optimally," said John Loebenstein, group executive information technology, St. George. That raised the need for sub-second failover recovery "to minimize any effect on customers in the event of a system failure."

New applications "like video conferencing and VoIP" put a much greater emphasis on the reliability and resiliency of the network infrastructure "because of the added stresses they put on available bandwidth," said Paul Bristow, St. George's executive manager, IT network services.

Total Telecom reports that German mobile operator E-Plus is saying simple tariff structures and a willingness to embrace the move to voice-over-IP are key to the success of Western European mobile operators.

Smelling the coffee, Thorsten Dirks, COO of E-Plus and sister company BASE has said recently that "new process models and new business models will drive our industry," rather than the development of new services.

KPN subsidiary E-Plus recently concluded a much-talked about partnership deal with Skype. With voice still accounting for the bulk of European operators' revenues, many of the operator's competitors have balked at the idea of allowing Skype access to their subscribers, Total Telecom reported.

"To be honest, I think that's stupid," said Dirks. "We believe we have to open up our networks for all these new providers."

Dirks admitted that as a result, "we're not the most loved operator in the community at the moment."

"E-Plus launched its marketing cooperation with Skype in November and in the three months to the end of January sold 1,500 starter packs. Around five percent of the operator's UMTS data customers are already using Skype, said Dirks, and Skype accounts for two percent of its total data traffic," the trade journal says.

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

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