Cascade Communications Awarded Contract for Integrated Backbone in One of Korea's Largest Private Frame Relay Networks

Business Wire, May 12, 1995

WESTFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 12, 1995--Cascade Communications Corp. today announced that its B-STDX multiservice switch has been selected to provide integrated frame relay switching for the Industrial Bank of Korea's (IBK) backbone network, one of the country's largest private frame relay networks. Cascade's Korean distributor and support provider, KDC Corp., in close partnership with Cascade's Asia/Pacific sales organization, was awarded the contract due to the B-STDX multiservice switch family's unmatched price/performance, scalability, reliability and flexible migration to ATM.

"We are pleased to provide IBK with the infrastructure it requires to efficiently serve its customers now and in the future," said Bob Machlin, vice president of marketing for Cascade. "By easily supporting current network traffic requirements as well as seamless migration to ATM, the new network enables IBK to maintain a strategic advantage in its market with the assurance that its information systems infrastructure will support increasingly complex multimedia network applications and requirements."

Previously, the IBK network supported diverse types of network traffic, including SNA/SDLC, TCP/IP, voice and an internal broadcast system, by carrying each on a separate channel. This configuration was expensive to manage and support. Cascade s B-STDX 9000 multiservice switch, managed by the CascadeView network management system, now allows the bank to merge all this traffic onto a single high-speed line, reducing management costs and significantly easing network support requirements.

"We explained our objectives and complex requirements to KDC Corp. and Cascade's local sales organization and were very impressed by the resulting network design based on their standards-based frame relay product offerings," said Jaesin Park, manager of IBK's Division of Strategic Computing. "We determined that only Cascade's B-STDX 9000 met our current and future data, voice and fax requirements."

Migration to ATM Was a Critical Factor

By simultaneously supporting diverse broadband services on a single backbone, the B-STDX 9000 allows the IBK to leverage its earlier technology investments while ensuring a flexible and cost-effective migration to ATM, a critical consideration for the IBK.

"Our objective was to ensure that the design for the IBK network would provide a high degree of reliability and protect the bank's existing technology investments while permitting them to migrate to other technologies in the future," said Sun-Goo Kwon, executive managing director of KDC Corp.'s Systems Business Development Group. "We worked closely with Cascade's local sales team to design a network that made sense from a cost and management perspective, as well as one that would contribute to the bank's long-term business objectives."

Any-to-any Connectivity Provided For Branch Offices

For the IBK's 350 branch offices, Cascade's B-STDX 9000 switch provides welcome relief to network inadequacies and severe congestion problems caused by the diversity of traffic required to support bank operations. The branches all require high-availability IBM SNA access, mission-critical access to application servers and switched voice/data traffic for any-to-any connectivity with other branches.

The existing PBX did not support multipoint connections between every branch because of the complicated numbering system required and the degradation of voice quality. By adopting the frame relay backbone provided by the B-STDX 9000, each IBK branch office is able to connect to every other office simply by dialing a three-digit extension - with no resulting degradation in voice quality. This is possible because the B-STDX switch family supports up to 4,000 Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVCs) on a single trunk.

One of the world's fastest growing data communications companies and price/performance leader in frame relay, Cascade Communications (NASDAQ:CSCC) of Westford, Mass. is a global provider of wide area networking products for the enterprise and public carrier network markets. The pioneer of multiservice WAN switches, Cascade is uniquely positioned to deliver enterprise-ready switches and network management solutions that enable customers to seamlessly integrate existing technologies with emerging ATM technology. Cascade multiservice switches offer the highest port density in the industry, sophisticated software provisioned to facilitate ATM migration, and the first platform to offer users a choice of WAN services for cost- effective network expansion and investment protection. Worldwide, private and public networks such as BellSouth, Bridge Information Systems, GTE, U.S. West, WilTel, and British Telecom rely on Cascade products for unparalleled quality of service and high-performance WAN services.

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Note to Editors: B-STDX, CascadeView, and The Cascade Logo are trademarks of Cascade Communications Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies.