Saudi Telecommunications Company (STC) has launched high-end Cisco CRS-1 platform throughout the Kingdom, as part of its plans to upgrade its main public data network to support triple play services – voice, video and data.
The Saudi telecommunications company is the first company to deploy the CRS-1 router – the greatest weapon in the arsenal of Cisco – in the Middle East and Africa, said the seller of the month. In the fast-track application which lasts only eight weeks, STC has installed nine new units of CRS-1 (Cisco Routing System-1) platform throughout the Kingdom.
STC said CRS implemented the platform to meet the growing demand for diversified communication services. “We have adopted the routing systems to manage top-level large volumes of data to meet the huge growth in the use of diversified communication services such as voice, video, data and multimedia,” Khaled Al-Ajlan, Vice President for STC’s network, he said. “We will continue working to provide a data network that will serve as a solid foundation for next generation network (NGN).
We aim to offer a wide range of innovative services for the applications for our customers,” he said. Other CRS-1 customers worldwide are Telecom Italia and Telstra in Australia. “We are offering a new platform for data network service so now STC can provide faster and more powerful and better data telecommunications services,” said Badr Albadr, general manager of Cisco Saudi Arabia.
Said a key benefit of the platform is that it allows customers to have greater bandwidth, enabling STC to add voice, video, data and multimedia services. Albadr said it would also be cost savings for STC: “In terms of its operations, as they are standardizing on a platform of operating costs will be much lower and, subsequently, the cost per megabyte is much lower.”