DAVOS, Switzerland, January 25, 2005 - Cisco Systems® announced today that its IP telephony, Long-Reach Ethernet (LRE) and wireless Internet technologies had been selected by Swisscom, Switzerland's leading telecoms company, to provide the communications infrastructure for this year's five-day World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos. The technology will for the first time at this event allow data, multimedia and voice communications to be carried over a single network, significantly reducing the network installation and maintenance costs for the annual event.
Swisscom has provided the information and communications technology infrastructure for the World Economic Forum summit since 2000 and was asked to look at ways of cutting IT costs this year. The use of a single network for voice and other communications will halve installation costs and enable a 10 percent reduction in the overall IT budget. The network will cover the congress center and 20 hotels around Davos, and will be used by approximately 3,000 summit attendees and 500 staff. IP telephony infrastructure will connect 200 fixed-line IP phones and 40 fax machines, to complement the Swisscom mobile phones that will be available to each attendee.
Security features will be maintained through a combination of firewalls and VPN technologies plus three separate wireless networks, one of which will be used for public wireless Internet access while the other two are devoted to communications by and between attendees, along with applications such as electronic voting and polling.
"The integrated security features of Cisco network platforms was an important factor in our choice of infrastructure," said René Fischer, CEO of Swisscom Solutions AG. "We were also keen to benefit from the flexibility of IP communications. The requirements of the users are subject to change right up until the start of the summit and it is a great bonus that, with IP telephony, we can simply unplug a phone in one building, take it to another location, and have it working as soon as we plug it in without having to reconfigure the network."
The World Economic Forum infrastructure is being installed in the four weeks running up to the annual meeting. It features a number of Cisco IP communications technologies, including Cisco CallManager on Cisco 7800 Series media convergence servers, Cisco Unity unified communications software, Cisco IP Phone 7960Gs (some with Cisco IP Phone 7914 expansion modules), a Cisco IP Conference Station 7936, Cisco VG200 Series analog phone gateways and Cisco ATA 180 Series analog telephone adaptors. In addition there are Cisco Access Control Servers, Cisco 2600XM Series multiservice routers, Cisco network modules and WAN interface cards, Cisco Catalyst® 3550 Series switches and Cisco LRE equipment.
"A robust communications infrastructure is a key ingredient in advancing economic and social programs and in helping to address many of the challenges and opportunities that face business and government leaders today," commented Robert Lloyd, President of Cisco operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa. It is therefore very appropriate that at this year's annual meeting delegates are able to benefit from just such a network which will offer a secure, flexible and cost-effective service with security features throughout the duration of the event."
