Ryanair budgets for £5m C&W network

Ryanair has extended its long-term relationship with Cable & Wireless to move to an IP-based pan-European network and set up a contact centre in Dublin.

The deal is worth £5m to the telco over five years.

Brona Kernan, head of IT at Ryanair, said C&W was chosen to save money, to scale as the airline grows and because it has one of Europe's most resilient networks.

For 2004 the budget airline pulled in €1.4bn in revenue with 94 per cent of its bookings made over its website - over the next five years it aims to increase passenger numbers and routes by 25 per cent.

As part of the arrangement, Ryanair staff will start to use voice over IP (VoIP), mainly by making phone calls from a soft phone - usually headsets plugged into laptops attached to the corporate network.

While such a move is becoming increasingly popular, a research note out today from analysts Frost & Sullivan says user organisations will still often resist the move to IP networks as they see the older public switched telephone network (PSTN) offering assured security and quality of service (QoS) - things that aren't always present with IP networks such as the public internet.

Ryanair said the C&W WAN will extend to 100 European destinations, in addition to 12 sites up and running now. The IP virtual private network used across the network will feature guaranteed QoS.

To cement their expanded relationship, C&W has also sponsored a new Ryannair 737-800.