SEOUL -- Cisco Systems® (NASDAQ:CSCO - News) today announced that KT, Korea's leading service provider, has selected the Cisco® CRS-1 Carrier Routing System as the company's KORNET backbone network solution. The decision is part of KT's strategy to enhance its existing KORNET network to meet customers' ever increasing demand for network services and to address the rapidly evolving Korea market. The Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, a core component of the Cisco Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture, offers capabilities, reliability and scalability required for service providers to offer next generation triple-play services. Leading service providers in worldwide are now aggressively deploying and enhancing their network infrastructure to seamlessly provide high bandwidth Internet applications that will rapidly grow over the next ten years, such as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), video telephony, video on demand (VoD), and IPTV.

"The Cisco CRS-1 is designed to meet the demanding requirements for service providers' core backbone networks now and in the future," said Hong Won Jeon, service provider sales manager of Cisco Systems Korea. "Along with a series of CRS-1 deployments by leading service providers in Korea and other parts of the world, KT's decision confirms that the CRS-1 is the optimal solution for the foundation of IP Next-Generation networks that deliver performance and customer benefits."

"Our goal is to build a network infrastructure that enables us to maintain and strengthen our leadership in providing an innovative Internet experience to our corporate and individual customers," said Tae-Sung Lim, network planning team manager of KT. "We expect our new core backbone infrastructure to allow us to extend our leadership and meet ever increasing customer demand of now and in the future."

In a separate release:

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cisco Systems® (NASDAQ:CSCO - News) today announced that BT has verified the functionality of the Cisco CRS-1, the core component of the Cisco IP Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture and an optimal platform for scaling digital video and IPTV applications and enabling network convergence using Secure Virtualization.

In the test, conducted in July of this year, three Secure Domain Routers (SDRs) were established in-service on a single CRS-1 multi-chassis system for broadcast TV, video-on-demand and core applications. The test showed support for 400,000 simultaneous unique multicast streams, and support for priority queuing and traffic shaping, protecting important digital video or voice-over-IP (VoIP) traffic from increases in latency and packet loss caused by oversubscription in lower traffic classes.

The CRS-1 was capable of creating new SDRs in-service without affecting the operation of any other SDR, demonstrating an ability to run multiple instances on a single routing system without interference or failure. This reliability and availability is critical to digital video and IPTV delivery.

"BT concludes that the CRS-1 SDR implementation represents a high-performance solution that can be used by service providers to deliver complex video services and converge existing router deployments onto a single next-generation platform," said Daniel Percy, Network Integration Engineer for BT.

"Exponential growth in digital video and IPTV will drive an entirely new set of metrics for throughput, capacity and performance at the core of the network," said Dr. Ray Mota, Chief Strategist for Synergy Research Group. "The Cisco CRS-1 offers service providers a set of capabilities that enable the delivery of dynamic video services. As a result, Cisco has recently gained market share in the core segment."

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)