Riverstone CEO sees growth in Broadband services
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 13 February 2003, 20:30 IST
Printer Print Email Email
SANTA CLARA: Riverstone President and CEO Romulus Pereira said Thursday in a meeting with European business leaders that it is vital that telecommunications service providers continue to invest in advanced service creation and delivery technology that will enable large business and residential consumers to reap the application advantages of broadband connections. "In the nineties, technology set the tone of the market as carriers scrambled to adopt the most recent advances in an effort to stay ahead of the competition," Pereira said. "Today, market demands are leading technology deployments as businesses and consumers increasingly require additional bandwidth for advanced streaming and network-based services." At the end of last year, approximately seven percent of all homes in Western Europe had a broadband connection, with Germany leading the continent at 39 percent, followed by Spain and Italy at 18 percent. Britain is one of the fastest growing markets in Europe with more than 1.3 million homes expected to sign up for broadband services this year, increasing the penetration rate to 11 percent of total homes. European businesses are also continuing to increase their spending on network services, especially virtual private networks (VPNs), data and communications security, data storage, and high-speed connections. The RoperNOP Technology Confidence Barometer recently projected that overall business expenditures on information technology will grow 6.8 percent this year across Europe. "The business market is asking for multi-site, multi-client and multi-service networks -- networks that scale across a campus, across organizations and that support a range of next-generation services," Pereira said. "As the business market moves toward this goal, these mission critical business networks are rapidly requiring carrier class scalability, predictability and reliability." Many European carriers are making significant investments in their network infrastructures to meet new market demands. Late last year, Riverstone Networks announced that its customer Telefonica de Espana, S.A.U., Spain's incumbent provider and a subsidiary of the world's fourth largest telecommunications company Telefonica, was building Spain's largest enterprise network to deliver advanced Ethernet services to business customers throughout Spain. France Telecom has also invested over $3 billion to modernize its telecommunications infrastructure. "Corporations are deploying enterprise-wide network-based education and training, video telephony and voice over IP applications while residential users are also running more bandwidth-intensive streaming video and data applications," said Pereira. "European service providers need to stay focused on where the market is headed so they have the technology ready to support it."

siliconindia