Royal Thai Navy Upgrades Network With New 3Com Core And Edge Solution

Navy selects 3Com solution for its higher reliability and performance at a lower price than competitors

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA – December 16, 2008 – 3Com Corporation (Nasdaq: COMS) today announced that the Royal Thai Navy (RTN) selected 3Com to upgrade its administrative LAN. The investment, which is approximately $1 million, extends RTN’s relationship with 3Com as its preferred networking vendor.

The new state-of-the-art system will keep up with rapid growth of users, and their demands for faster response times when using online applications. The new network backbone consists of 3Com core switches between the RTN's headquarters in Bangkok and its Sattahip naval base supported by an optical fibre cable WAN network.
“We require the most reliable and stable network solution to support the Navy’s very large and distributed IT network across the country,” said Captain Suchart Nutchanart, Head of Operations, Naval Electronics Department of the Royal Thai Navy. “Since we have been working with 3Com, we have been very impressed with the performance and reliability of their technology as well as their excellent after-sales service, which includes training programs for our staff. Another reason for selecting 3Com was their ability to meet our requirements within a budget that represents great value for our organization.”

The new network effectively delivers 10 gigabits per second of bandwidth across the backbone network, and gigabit speeds across the distributed network, a significant improvement over the Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) speeds in the old network. It supports a wide range of applications, including electronic archiving, human resource management, financial management, supply management, and other in-house applications.

The 10-Gigabit backbone network is powered by 3Com® Switch 8800 core switches. These intelligent, multilayer modular LAN switches are ideal for enterprise environments where non-stop availability of critical applications and the highest performance, security, and granular control are required.

3Com Switch 5500 distribution switches with single-mode fiber optic links were deployed in ten other locations. These were later upgraded to the higher-end 3Com Switch 7700 switches to support faster Gigabit-speed connections. The 3Com 7700 modular LAN switches deliver high performance, multilayer, 10-Gigabit, Gigabit, and Fast Ethernet switching, with available Power over Ethernet (PoE) support.