Ericsson Ltd, the UK end of the Swedish multinational that has put the doubters to flight in its single-minded determination to play a leading role on the world stage in all facets of data and telecommunications, is still small – smaller than it was after selling $1,000m of volume to Nokia Oy when it divested what has always been an open drain for money, its Ericsson – formerly Datasaab – Information Systems arm. But it has demonstrated that it can slug it out toe to toe with giants like Siemens AG – even in the daunting US market. It chose to display its IDNX TRM Transmission Resource Manager at Networks ’90 for the first time this week, claiming that this was a truly holistic way of handling voice and data traffic over private leased networks. Previously, voice traffic and data traffic were integrated only after passing through a private banch exchange or X25 line respectively: the IDNX range, which Ericsson is supplying as the result of a product development agreement with US-based Network Equipment Technologies Inc (CI No 1,328), reaches behind the private branch exchange and X25 link to integrate voice and data traffic from its source, and then allocates bandwidth according to demand and priority – this, according to sales and marketing manager Andrew Evans, can reduce line costs by 10% to 20%, making for an average payback times starting from a year. The IDNX range operates on networks using Ericsson’s Eripax X25 packet switched network and the Ericsson MD110 private branch exchange; it consists of the IDNX/20, supporting up to 336 voice calls and 56 data calls, and the IDNX/70 for up to 768 voice and 400 data calls. The investment required to incorporate the IDNX resource managers into a network will naturally vary enormously, but a typical contract on the kind of large network Ericsson is looking at would probably start in the region of UKP100,000. Mark John