Northern Telecom Inc has won a contract, worth $15m, to build an international packet switching network for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, Swift. The network, based on Northern Telecom’s DPN100 switches, will cover 2,600 bank locations in 60 countries, and provide the basis for the Swift I and Swift II financial message processing and transmission networks; value added services will run on the X25 backbone networks. Northern Telecom says the network will be compatible with the protocols specific to the existing Swift network; it says an initial network will be in place by the end of the year, with full deployment by 1991. The test facility will be in the Netherlands, with seven initial sites, in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, West Germany and two sites in the United States. The Canadians claim the DPN-100 delivers up to 30,000 user access lines and a throughput of up to 30,000 switched user data packets a second.
