Alcatel announced that KPN, the incumbent operator in The Netherlands, has selected Alcatel to upgrade its broadband aggregation networking in order to deliver triple play services across the country. KPN will use a next generation Ethernet aggregation network from Alcatel to offer advanced services such as video on demand (VoD), IPTV to residential subscribers and layer two Ethernet services to its business customers.

"Upgrading our network to introduce triple play is the next step in our quest to offer the most advanced services available today to our customers," said Eelco Blok, KPN Director of Corporate Strategy. "Alcatel demonstrated that its purpose-built Ethernet/MPLS solution has all the features necessary, such as quality of service and high quality operation, administration, and management to ensure a fast roll-out of these higher value services."

After an intensive two-month test period, the Alcatel solution, which includes the Alcatel 7450 Ethernet Service Switch (ESS) and the Alcatel 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM), demonstrated industry leading scalability, manageability and high availability to deliver triple play services from 28 main Points of Presence (POP) located in 14 different regions. While traditional Ethernet switches provide best effort connectivity, the Alcatel solution was built with carrier class features allowing operators like KPN to improve their offerings and deliver more reliable, higher value services such as video and business VPNs.

"In keeping with KPN's reputation as an innovative service provider, the company is taking rapid measures to accommodate the wishes of its residential and business customers," said Basil Alwan, president of Alcatel's IP activities. "The selection process for this deal was extremely tough but the performance of our solution combined with extensive expertise in rolling out triple play services proved we are the right partner for this significant network upgrade."

The contract follows the recent announcement by KPN of 1.3 million DSL lines upgrade with Alcatel's ADSL2plus technology, offering significantly increased bandwidth compared with the traditional ADSL and preparing for triple play service delivery.

With more than 70 service provider customers in more than 30 countries, and a tripling of market share in Q2 2005 to 11% (source: Ovum-RHK), Alcatel is demonstrating that its IP portfolio is setting the pace for triple play infrastructure deployments.