News, Contracts, Retailing, Customer Support, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Czech Republic, CEE: Central European Holding BV (GTSCE), the Central European fixed-line telecoms group, is officially launching its regional MPLS network for retail customers.

The MPLS network is designed to be a single robust and high-quality entity covering five GTS CE countries (Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic) with a single Network Operation Centre located in Prague. Using this network, companies operating throughout Europe can link their regional branch offices with adequate and secure state-of-the-art data connections. The product launch is described by GTSCE as “ground-breaking” as it provides a cross-border MPLS network.

Most international MPLS networks are simply a number of national networks linked together but GTSCE’s claim is a single Central-European wide MPLS network. As such, GTSCE customers may benefit from the following technical and financial advantages:

• lower costs (a single network is cheaper to operate and run than several linked together);
• more robust networking (a single managed network run by GTS CE rather than several networks managed by different companies);
• higher network availability;
• higher quality parameters;
• quicker repair time; and
• centralised performance management and pro-active network maintenance.

The company Palace Cinemas has used the new MPLS network within the context of its pilot operations. The company interconnected its multiplexes and branches in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary through the network. The new network in turn provided for, inter alia, use of the remote access function by mobile users or establishment of a central booking and accounting system. MPLS is the most powerful and secure IP technology available today. It provides a unified network to assure data and voice communication among customer localities with QoS (Quality of Service), SLA (Service Level Agreement), logically and securely separated customer-based VPN (Virtual Private Network) and various value-added features. Such features are now available from GTS CE on a single managed MPLS network across the entire Central European region.

* Central Europe GTS Central Europe (GTS CE) is a multi-layered infrastructure-based provider of integrated telecoms solutions for those countries of Central and Eastern Europe lying between Frankfurt and Istanbul. Using its own regional fibre network, GTSCE provides fixed voice, data, IP (Internet Protocol), MPLS and broadband services primarily to business customers as well as services to other telecoms carriers, mobile operators and providers of content. GTS CE's primary countries of operation are the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania with network extensions and local partnerships into the neighbouring countries of the Ukraine, Baltic States, Bulgaria, Russia, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Moldova and Turkey.

• more info: www.gtsce.com