Bay Networks has beaten top competitors Cisco Systems and 3Com Corp to provide the multi-million dollar infrastructure for the China Wide Web (CWW).
The China Internet Corp (CIC) last week announced the roll out of CWW services, a country-wide intranet for mainland corporations and government agencies that will provide news, data and business-to-business communications. Bay Networks was chosen to provide the hardware, software and network management for the project.
Bill Ting, Bay's Asia-Pacific systems and engineering manager, said the company would use its backbone concentrator node routers in Beijing as the main hub to connect local area networks (LANs) to the wide area network (WAN) and the satellite network of Xinhua (the New China News Agency), which already reaches 50 cities in China. Bay's access stack node router would be used for smaller sites.
CIC's vice-president of network operations, Aaron Y T Cheung, said the company planned to roll out services every six months, with the target of 20 new sites this year.
He said Bay was chosen for its equipments' ability to scale quickly to a large number of users and for its network management software, Optivity. Sun Microsystems won the contract to provide enterprise servers for the Internet.
Mr Ting said Bay would use asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and fast ethernet technology in the LAN and offer remote access through modems, integrated services digital network (ISDN) terminal adapters, leased lines, X.25 and frame relay.
