UTStarcom

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UTStarcom (NASDAQ:UTSI) was established in 1991and has its headquarters in Alameda, California, United States. The Fortune 500 company delivers innovative Internet Protocol (IP)-based solutions to service providers in both emerging and established telecommunications markets around the world. UTStarcom enables its customers to rapidly deploy revenue-generating access services using their existing infrastructure, while providing a migration path to cost-efficient, end-to-end IP networks. UTStarcom has research and development operations in the United States, Canada, China, Korea and India.

The company’s strategic focus is on three core markets: Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), Next Generation Networks (NGN) and Broadband. UTStarcom developed the industry’s first and only end-to-end IPTV solution, RollingStream, and is the leading IPTV provider in Asia today. Telecom operators, broadband service providers and cable and satellite operators can use RollingStream to deliver a complete service to their subscribers comprising Broadcast TV, Triple Play, High Definition TV, Time-Shift TV, Video on Demand, Internet Gaming, Video Calling and a host of other personalized and interactive services. IPTV can be bundled with an operator's existing broadband and voice services to revolutionize the way television is viewed, making it more interactive and personalized to the end user. UTStarcom has the capability to provide its RollingStream IPTV service via broadband, Fiber to the x (FTTx) and Digital Subscriber Line (xDSL), and wireless networks.

With RollingStream currently supporting than one million IPTV subscribers globally, and a current total system capacity of more than 2.5 million subscribers, when initial seeking a database platform, high performance was critical in the selection process. RollingStream had to provide the scalability, reliability and bandwidth efficiency required for operators to offer new services and applications over their existing and new broadband networks and ensure the number of system users could be extended into the millions. At the same time, cost had to be carefully controlled within the architecture phase of the project.

UTStarcom was previously using Sun products and following an extensive comparison of the industry's database platforms, UTStarcom was impressed by Sun's MySQL database with its high availability and proven ability to scale. UTStarcom deployed a combination of MySQL and MySQL Cluster software running on Windows and Linux operating systems to provide e-commerce, online transaction processing (OLTP), and data warehousing able to be scaled up to the gigabyte range, while providing a strong price-to-performance ratio.

MySQL delivers a cost-effective, low maintenance and highly available database solution for RollingStream. It integrates the world's most popular open-source database and fault-tolerant database cluster architectures, enabling RollingStream to ensure 99.999 percent availability for its mission-critical applications, equating to less than five minutes of downtime per year. The open source platform ensures multiple sources of support from both Sun and the developer community for UTStarcom.

The RollingStream solution is deployed using a distributed architecture, which consists of five parts: content service platform, storage distribution platform, operation support platform, network distribution platform and terminal service platform. This flexible distributed architecture has no single point of failure, enabling UTStarcom to incrementally scale its applications in a linear fashion enabling it increase capacity as demand grows. This eliminates the need to invest in expensive hardware and lowers the total cost of ownership (TOC).

MySQL has scaled with UTStarcom as it has grown its IPTV business. Since its roll out UTStarcom has provided RollingStream system devices and terminal products to more than 10 carriers on every continent, and has demonstrated a perfect triple play service in China, Japan, India, Brazil and Taiwan. High performance and availability haven given global telecom operators an unlimited opportunity to implement IPTV quickly, ensuring high-quality TV and a favorable end user experience.

Operators prefer RollingStream because of its highly distributed, streaming-based architecture; its proven ability to reliably scale to support multi-million subscriber deployments; and its flexibility to enable service providers to offer additional value-added services. Furthermore RollingStream's unique end-to-end architecture allows it to be both flexible and long-reaching in scope to support deployments in a small populated town or an entire country or region.