BANGALORE, INDIA: Orange Business Services, France Telecom Group's division for worldwide enterprise services and an information and communications technology provider, had enhanced its next-generation converged IP network in Asia Pacific to deliver greater coverage, capacity, performance and resilience to its multinational enterprise customers.

Designed to handle data, voice, video, mobility and versatile access methods, Orange Business Services' next-generation network would integrate innovations such as Multicast, IPv6 and telepresence. In particular, the Orange network is capable of handling in-the-cloud application, acceleration and security, as well as converged voice, video and telepresence services.

Yee-May Leong, senior vice president Asia Pacific, Orange Business Services, said: "Enterprises operating in Asia Pacific need networks that will help them adapt to the new economic realities and the need for greater cost control, while responding in tandem to the demand for rapid presence anywhere, anytime as the business requires."

Orange Business Services, present in 40 countries in Asia Pacific, had ten diverse cable paths including, Asia-Europe direct path via Russia; India-Middle East direct path; Asia-South Africa direct path; South Korea-Hong Kong direct path; and Taiwan-Japan direct path.

Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, Orange's key APAC countries, were being transformed to a 2.5G bandwidth "ring", while India and Australia are connected by multiple 622M links. Trans-Pacific and Asia-Europe links had also been upgraded to Gbit/s levels. Domestic networks in key countries, including India, would reach Gbit/s level in 2009. All these capacities had been dedicated to multinational customers' intranet traffic and decoupled from the public Internet.

Orange Business Services' APAC network included 60 next-generation routers to support the company's new service enhancements, such as:

High bandwidth international Ethernet link available in seven countries, including Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea;

Network Boost for application prioritisation, management and SLA to ensure required quality  for critical applications;

IP VPN for telepresence to meet enterprise needs to reduce travel costs and enable remote meetings; and

Network protect, which would provide embedded security needed by branch offices to deal with new threats and provide 24/7 managed security.

Orange Business Services was recently named Best Managed Services Provider and Best Asian Telecom Carrier at the Telecom Asia Awards 2009, Asia's leading telecom industry honours, in Hong Kong on March 27. Also, Orange Business Services won the Best Business Service Solution award from Telecom World, China's leading telecommunications magazine, for Business Acceleration at a ceremony on March 31.