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Macedonian Telekom Corporate IP Network Project

Makedonski Telekomunikacii is a major national operator in Macedonia that was privatized on the beginning of 2001. It offers local, long distance, and international voice and data services, leased lines, mobile telephony, and Internet access within Macedonia. MT will be the first service provider in South Eastern Europe to adopt IP throughout their backbone network, in order to provide New World services, such as Intranets and Extranets using MPLS/IP Virtual Private Networks.

One of the first customers of the MPLS/IP VPN service is MT itself, for their enterprise network implementation, which will be a foundation for practically all of MT’s key internal applications (ERP, Billing & Customer Care, MIS, GIS, Fraud Detection, etc.).

MT has chosen Cisco Systems’ products and technology to realize their enterprise networking strategy. Pexim, a local system integrator and Cisco’s Silver Certified Partner, has been appointed as Prime to design stage & deploy this MT Enterprise Network Project.

Objectives

The strategic business objectives of MT are to provide contemporary network services as a foundation for new applications, such as: ERP, MIS, Billing, GIS, etc. Network services implemented:

VLANs within each location
MAN in the wider Skopje area
WAN, using MPLS/IP VPN
Dial backup of the WAN to regional centers
Internet access
Centralized network management

Security mechanisms: access lists, encrypted tunnels over WAN, firewalling over WAN, accounting.

Network Solution

The project will deliver a Cisco Enterprise Network solution, that will use the existing Cisco MPLS/IP VPN network for interconnection of WAN nodes, and both single mode and multimode fibre-optic infrastructure for interconnection of LAN and MAN nodes. There are 5 different node categories, these are:

LAN Core nodes.
LAN Distribution and Access nodes.
WAN Core nodes.
Dial Access nodes.
WAN Access nodes.

The Network Management System (NMS) will enable efficient and effective service provision and service monitoring for all network nodes. It comprises Cisco Works 2000 LAN Management Solution and Cisco Works 2000 Routed WAN Solution, and will be located at a central site in Skopje.

The new network can be logically divided into following parts:

Corporate LAN in Skopje headquarters
MAN in other location throughout the city
WAN for interconnecting 13 branch offices on the national level
Branch office LANs

In the LAN and MAN part layer-3 switching solutions will be used deploying Catalyst 6509 and 4006 platforms with multimillion layer-3 packet forwarding rate and the links between the devices will be between 2-6 Gbps full duplex GigabitEther Channel.

Core

From Figure 1 you can see that there is complete redundancy in layers 1-3 to ensure high availability.

LAN

LAN is interconnected through three c6509 core switches. The topology on Figure 2 shows that there is one Layer2 or Layer3 switch (c4006 or c4003 series) on almost every floor in four buildings in the Central Office. Each switch is connected to one of the Core switches with 1Gbps uplink realized with single mode fiber connection.

MAN

Existing infrastructure in wider Skopje area is built on single mode fiber-optic cables, currently used for the SDH transport network (the topology on Figure 3).

WAN

For WAN connections among the Central site in Skopje (TK Center) and Regional centers, both the MPLS/IP Backbone and the SDH network are utilized.

The topology diagrams for the WAN part of the new MT Corporate network are presented on the following figures, where Figure 4 represents connectivity via the MPLS network and Figure 5 via the SDH network.