France Telecom has announced an Asynchronous Transfer Mode marketing strategy that focusses on immediate network requirements for the majority of users, publishing tariffs for services that will be rolled out in nine cities in the first quarter of next year. The monthly fees will be the equivalent of $3,200 for 2Mbps; $5,850 for 4Mbps; $10,350 for 10Mbps; $16,550 for 16Mbps; and $20,450 for 25Mbps. Via its pilot experiments with customers Dassault Electronique SA, Hewlett-Packard Co, the National Institute for Research and Informatics and Automation, Thomson-CSF SA and television station TF1, the French operator has installed seven Asynchronous Mode switches in Grenoble, Lyon, Paris and Sophia Antipolis, connected by 34Mbps and 140Mbps lines. Transrel, as the service is called, is not yet native, so Asynchronous Mode traffic will not be sent from the desktop or local network to the wide area network. Instead, traffic will be configured using Connectionless Broadband Data Service – Europe’s version of Switched Multimegabit Data Service – and encapsulated in an Asynchronous Mode cell for transport across the backbone. Yves Nicolas, marketing manager for data transmission services, told our sister paper Network Week that the network would be migrated to native Asynchronous Transfer Mode next year. The tariffs are volume-based and priced 30% to 40% lower than the operator’s rates for leased private lines, said sales director Jean-Jacques Damlamian.
Common technologies
The service was initially tailored to provide local network interconnection because users are trying to deploy their local networks and we believed there would be enough leased line capacity to satisfy them [for other applications]. Klaus Joachim, from Deutsche Bundespost Telekom, present at the announcement, talked about its efforts in Germany and its collaboration with France Telecom. It has pilot networks in Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne and Bonn and will add 23 other cities by the end of 1995. He said, Our equipment is based on common technologies, so our clients can benefit from the [ATM] services on both sides. The two operators will interconnect Transrel and the German’s Datex service. France Telecom’s tariffs are higher than Deutsche Telekom’s: the one-time installation fee in France ranges from $9,750 to $49,000; the German carrier charges just $590. The difference seems to be that France Telecom is trying to lure private leased-line customers without destroying that base, while the German is trying to encourage users to take up the technology. The two operators announced that they will carry out a separate Asynchronous Mode trial under their Atlas joint venture. The trial, in December, will connect Paris and Lyon with Karlsruhe and Stuttgart, using Asynchronous Transfer Mode cross-connects from IBM Corp and Siemens AG. The trial, unlike the pan-European Asynchronous Transfer Mode pilot project that focusses on the physical connection of carrier broadband networks, is aimed at testing network management and video services. Also at the Interop show, France Telecom and Telecom Italia SpA demonstrated an Asynchronous Transfer Mode connection within the context of the pan-European pilot project. France’s Centre Nationale D’Etudes Telecommunications, CNET, in Lannion, linked with the research centre for Italian holding company Stet SpA, CSELT, in Turin. The connection enables the exchange of full-motion video, drawings, text and sound between workstations.
