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Global Crossing Managed IP Network Helps Royal Mail Get Sorted
Lockheed Martin is the Prime System Integrator for the Address Interpretation (AI) project - a multi-year programme by Royal Mail to implement a fully integrated, national mail processing system that will further improve Royal Mail's efficiency and reduce operating costs. The project was initiated in response to mounting competitive pressure and to improve the efficiency of the postal service in the face of increased electronic communications.
The AI system will provide a networked solution linking the 73 regional mail centres distributed across the entire UK to create an integrated, national network of mail processing machines that sort and sequence letters for efficient dispatch via the mail centres. Global Crossing's role is to implement and manage the wide area network connecting the mail centres and the three Manual Data Entry Centres (MDECs) via fully resilient, dual, diversely routed circuits. The IP network also extends to the Lockheed Martin's Open Systems Laboratory and Royal Mail's IT division.
John Legere, Global Crossing Chief Executive Officer, said: "In many respects, Global Crossing is the perfect partner for this major infrastructure project. In the UK, our 8,000km broadband network is structured around the railways and closely maps the location of most mail sorting depots which are sited near railway stations for historical logistics reasons. Whilst network reach was a critical factor in arriving at a highly cost-effective wide area solution for Lockheed Martin, Global Crossing was able to back this up with the high performance and resilience criteria required to support such a time-sensitive operation."
Because of the high traffic volumes into the MDECS, Global Crossing will be laying direct fibre optic links ranging from 155 to 34Megabit/s while the links between the mail centres will operate at 2, 4 and 8Mbit/s. The network is scheduled to be fully operational in late 2002.
By integrating individual mail processing machines to operate and communicate within the AI system framework, Royal Mail will increase efficiency, overall functionality, and performance for mail services in the UK. The AI application supported by Global Crossing's resilient network infrastructure automatically takes an electronic image of a mail piece at the originating mail centre, extracts 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 the destination mail centre. At the destination mail centre the mail piece is sorted further using the information provided by the originating mail centre across Global Crossing's network. The high bandwidth, low latency and high availability of Global Crossing's wide area network is an integral part of the AI system by providing fast and reliable transport of images and related data.