April 18, 2008	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 11, 1429

KARACHI, April 17: The National TelecommunicationCorporation (NTC) has signed an IP Core Network Rollout Contract to expand its current IP services circle from three to 21 cities across the country.

A statement issued here on Thursday said that NTC signed the contract with the Nokia Siemens Networks.

The Internet Protocol (IP) backbone is a prerequisite for next generation networking designed to run multimedia and real-time applications.

The statement said the project would enable the NTC to move to next generation networking switching and transmission networks to provide state of the art services, sell IP bandwidth to other operators and offer virtual private networks to its customer as well.

“Nokia Siemens Networks demonstrated its capability as a true solution provider and we are looking forward to implementing this landmark project with NTC,” said Veqar Ul Islam, Country Director of Pakistan and Afghanistan for Nokia Siemens Networks.

“This step will enable NTC’s infrastructure to transform from public switched telephone network to a fully IP-enabled next generation networking. Globally, telecom carriers are migrating to IP-based architecture which reduces service costs considerably.

Today, we join them in bringing better telecommunications services to our customers,” said Khalid Javed, COO of NTC.—APP