Bahrain Telecom Chooses Cisco Metro Ethernet

MANAMA, Bahrain, Oct. 10 -- Cisco Systems announced that the Bahrain Telecommunications Co., Batelco, has selected its metro Ethernet switching portfolio to help provide business broadband connectivity over a fiber network as part of Bahrain's e-Government initiative. Batelco has access to existing dark fiber in Manama and is expanding the reach of this fiber as a foundation of the government data network and commercial business connectivity in Manama.

Batelco will initially be able to connect all of Bahrain's government ministries with a high-speed broadband network and to help commercial institutions migrate existing wide-area network connectivity to Gigabit Ethernet over fiber. Batelco will use Cisco IOS software to manage and modify bandwidth allocations on an individual customer basis.

The telecom is building a metro Ethernet switching architecture powered by Catalyst 3550 switches at the network edge, together with the Cisco ONT 1031 (optical network terminator) within customer sites, and Cisco 7600 and Cisco 7200 series Internet routers in the broadband aggregation layer. The new architecture will also include the Cisco Ethernet subscriber edge solution engine for managing the fiber end-points within customers' premises.

Batelco is deploying multiprotocol label switching within the core to differentiate and streamline traffic types and provide the basis for rolling out voice-over IP and video services in the future.

For more information, visit: www.cisco.com/go/metro