[July 06, 2005]

Global Crossing and Lockheed Martin Provide Royal Mail's Managed IP System

Global Crossing just extended its eight year contract with Lockheed Martin by three more years in order to jointly offer a fully managed IP system for the Royal Mail.

BY JOHANNE TORRES
TMCnet VoIP Minute Watch Columnist

IP-based network provider Global Crossing just extended its eight year-long contract with Lockheed Martin by three more years in order to jointly offer a fully managed IP system for the Royal Mail in the United Kingdom. Royal Mail is the nationwide postal service operated by holding company Royal Mail Group plc. The extension agreement is valued at $14 million making the contract run until 2011.

"The extension of our agreement with Lockheed Martin illustrates how Global Crossing is following through on its strategy to develop partnerships and alliances, building on the strong relationships we have with systems integrators in the UK to expand these relationships across the globe," said John Legere, CEO at Global Crossing. "Global Crossing will continue to provide Lockheed Martin and thus the Royal Mail with the high performance required to support such a time-sensitive operation, as we have done since 2001."

Lockheed Martin is the prime systems integrator for the Address Interpretation (AI) project, a program implemented by the Royal Mail to provide an integrated, national mail processing system. The company explained that the AI system provides a networked solution linking the regional mail centers distributed across the UK to create an integrated, national network of mail processing machines that sort and direct letters for efficient dispatch. Global Crossing provides and manages the wide-area IP network connecting the mail centers and a number of Manual Data Entry Centre locations (MDECs) via fully resilient, dual, diversely routed circuits.

"We needed a system that would be more cost effective, solve our outstanding problems and create a platform for future business," said Dave Smith, head of technology for mail sorting at the Royal Mail. "To do that we needed to integrate the best technology from across the industry and we couldn't see a path to delivering that on our own. The solution provided by Lockheed and Global Crossing has already delivered a 50 percent increase in automated address reading, and there will be more improvements to come."

The companies explained that by integrating individual mail processing machines to operate and communicate within the AI system framework, the Royal Mail has increased efficiency, overall functionality and performance for mail services in the UK. Global Crossing supports the AI application with its resilient network infrastructure in order to automatically take an electronic image of a mail piece at the originating mail center, extract the address information by optical character recognition algorithms and, if required, human interpretation and then uses this information to sort the mail piece for transport to its destination. Following that process at the destination mail center, mail pieces are sorted once more for delivery, using the information provided by the originating mail center across Global Crossing's network.

Global Crossing made the news last month when the company announced another collaboration deal with VoX Communications. Vox will introduce what the company describes as a total VoIP system. Using the new system, the company, through a nationwide network, will be terminating traffic with Global Crossing VoIP Outbound Services and using the wireless IP phones and VoIP customer access devices from UTStarcom, Inc. Vox�s VoIP system includes VoX�s wholly owned packet telephony technology and its nationwide network with Tier One interconnection partners like Global Crossing, who operates a global IP-based network and SIP-based VoIP platform.

The company also has a relationship with VoIP-based calling services provider BroadVoice. The partnership, announced at towards the end of last year, provides BroadVoice with Global Crossing's VoIP Outbound service and Global Crossing VoIP DID service to provide its residential and business customers with IP-based local and long-distance voice communications.

Global Crossing
www.globalcrossing.com

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Johanne Torres is contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more articles by Johanne Torres, please visit:

http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100006&nm=Johanne%
20Torres

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