SEOUL, Feb. 24 2000 - Kornet, the ISP subsidiary of telecom giant Korea Telecom, has upgraded its network backbone by deploying over thirty Cisco GSR 12012 Gigabit Switch Routers at major provincial cities in the Korean Peninsula.

Kornet is the first service provider in Korea to offer commercial leased lines to businesses, and has continued to upgrade its Internet backbone as a result of Korea's phenomenal Internet growth. This latest upgrade to KT's high speed IP network is a direct response to the rapid rise in Internet traffic and number of subscribers over the last year.

Mr. Ki-Soo Choi, manager of KT's Internet team, said: "By the end of 1998, Internet subscribers numbered only 80,000, but that figure has grown to half a million by the end of 1999. As a matter of fact, Internet traffic in Korea is expected to grow by more than 600% year-on-year. The soaring popularity of the Internet in Korea is primarily due to the growth of multimedia data traffic and the increasing popularity of the Internet as a tool for social interaction. To cope with the additional load on our network, we decided that a radical restructuring of our network backbone was needed."

By deploying GSRs, Kornet has upgraded its country-wide backbone bandwidth up to 2.5Gbps (Gigabits per second) and transferred existing equipment previously deployed at large cities to small- and medium-sized cities, establishing a transmission network ranging in speed from 155Mbps (Megabits per second) to 622Mbps. As a result of its efforts, it now boasts the largest backbone network in the nation linking eight major cities, including Seoul, Pusan and Taejon, at 2.5Gbps.

"With the emergence of broadband access equipment, the Internet environment has been enhanced and subscribers now demand a slew of multimedia services, including Internet broadcast," said Choi. "As Internet growth accelerates, scalability and reliability are crucial in any selection process for infrastructure equipment. We look for a high degree of robustness that can process very large traffic volume at high speeds without fail."

Commenting on KT's selection of Cisco GSR products, he said, "After considering all the different criteria, we concluded that the Cisco GSR was the most suitable for smooth migration. We selected GSR because it meets our need for scalability and reliable performance. "

Dr. Sung-Won Hong, manager of Cisco Systems Korea, said: "Kornet has shown admirable foresight by anticipating the incredible growth of the Internet in Korea, and their vision has paid enormous dividends. Their network has kept pace with subscriber growth all over Korea, and this latest upgrade will allow them to match new developments as our country continues to wire up."