Norwood, Massachusetts-based Telco Systems Inc is expanding from its established US base to sell products globally. It has recently opened offices in Hong Kong, to cover Asia Pacific, and Brussels, for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a director for Latin America has been appointed and an office will shortly be opened there, and, most importantly, it has begun production of International Telecommunications Union-compliant products that it can sell in these new markets. In the UK, Northern Telecom Ltd will become a reseller of Telco Systems’ products and it appears partnerships with companies such as Nortel will become common around the globe. It hopes to grow the proportion of revenues derived from overseas sales to around 33% from 6% currently; last year it had a turnover of about $100m. Telco Systems has three major areas of business: bandwidth optimisation, network access and fibre optics. The new products come from the network access side and are multiplexers, which the company described as network acc ess servers. The Access60, which has been shipping in the US for a year, has eight E1 trunk interfaces; the Access50 is totally new and has two E1 trunk interfaces. The company said they have been designed to enable network operators link into different types of technology, from basic telephone service at the low end, right up to Asynchronous Transfer Mode at the top. Service providers can mix analogue speech with digital data communications if they wish using the products. They can also be configured to provide full redundancy. Software can be downloaded using a PC Card, which means changes can be effected more easily than users having to swap boards. This flexibility extends to the price, from ú4,000 up to ú20,000. Nortel will market the Access50 and 60 at operators offering small to medium-sized businesses network services, especially Centrex.