More customers for MRV optical product?
December 23, 1999 07:17
FOCUS-Swisscom names Siemens,Cisco network partners
BERNE, Dec 23 (Reuters) - Swisscom AG said on Thursday it had selected Siemens AG of Germany and Cisco Systems Inc of the United
States as partners to modernise the Swiss telecommunications network and integrate voice and data traffic.
Siemens and Cisco will start work as soon as January 2000 but details of their contracts will be worked out in the first quarter of 2000, a
spokeswoman said.
The spokeswoman added the group would invest 200 million Swiss francs ($125.9 million) on this particular part of the upgrade, but this was not
additional spending and would come from its regular budget.
She declined to say which other companies Swisscom had considered for the deal. Alcatel SA of France and Lucent Technologies Inc of the
United States are also active in this sector of telecommunications.
The spokeswoman said Alcatel, as well as Ericsson AB and Nortel Networks Corp , remained "systems partners" of Swisscom.
Swisscom said in its statement it wanted to modernise its network to a packet-switched network based on Internet Protocol (IP) and
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technologies.
"The aim of the modernisation is to further reduce network infrastructure costs, to increase flexibility for the launch of new services and to create
a standard platform for electronic-commerce and broadband communication, for example," it said.
Swisscom said it invests "considerably" each year in upgrading and extending the network infrastructure and said there was a change-over from
circuit-switched to packet-switched telecoms networks under way in the industry.
Siemens and Cisco will have to develop and oversee a migration strategy to the new network which will converge voice and data
communications on a standard multi-service platform.
"The cooperation with Siemens and Cisco will allow Swisscom to reduce investment and technology risks and to benefit from the international
experience of both companies," Swisscom said.
The spokeswoman said that the cooperation with the network and systems partners was expected to yield more projects which would all be
judged as separate business cases for viability.
UNISOURCE COMPLETES SELL-OFF
At 1115 GMT, Swisscom shares were up over one percent at 643 Swiss francs, not far from the 656 francs all-time high it set on December 20.
Traders said the reason behind today's rise was the announcement that Unisource had sold the D-Plus mobile services provider in Germany to
Mobilcom .
This completes the sale of assets of the unwinding Unisource alliance of Swisscom, KPN NV and Telia of Sweden. Unisource retains a 100
percent stake in the AUCS international services unit which is now managed by Infonet Services Corp .
Swisscom shares gained in the past few weeks on the back of news it will spin-off its Blue Window Internet services unit as well as due to the
succesful initial public offering of Infonet in which it still has a 17.7 percent stake.
($1=1.589 Swiss Franc)
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