SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 19, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- 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, please visit www.infinera.com.
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This press release contains certain forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on information available to Infinera as of the date hereof; and actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied, due to risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding Infinera's expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future, such as the benefits and capabilities of our products and the Digital Optical Network's architecture, including our ability to enable The Carphone Warehouse to deliver the capacity and services needed by its customers, our ability to enable our customers to achieve far better economics and scale, our ability to enable our customers to roll out high capacity, high quality services, our ability to deliver continuous service to any point in the network, our ability to offer industry-leading speed of service delivery, our ability to be operated by a significantly smaller engineering staff than required by traditional DWDM networks, and other statements that can be identified by forward-looking words such as "anticipated," "believed," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "should," "will," and "would" or similar words. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include aggressive business tactics by our competitors, our dependence on a single product, our ability to protect our intellectual property, claims by others that we infringe their intellectual property, our manufacturing process is very complex, product performance problems we may encounter, our dependence on sole or limited source suppliers, our ability to respond to rapid technological changes, our ability to maintain effective internal controls, the ability of our contract manufacturers to perform as we expect, general political, economic and market conditions and events, including war, conflict or acts of terrorism; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our public announcements, reports to stockholders and other documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. These statements are based on information available to us as of the date hereof and we assume no obligation to update the forward-looking statements included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.