China's Ministry of Railways is enhancing customer service for millions of rail passengers by boosting the performance and capacity of its computerized ticketing and reservation system with Nortel (NT).

Ministry of Railways bureaus in the cities of Zhengzhou, Shanghai, Harbin Xi'an and Lanzhou, are using Nortel Application Switches to improve the speed and reliability of the ticketing and reservation process, helping reduce queuing times at ticket windows and vending machines, particularly during rush hours, holidays and other peak travel periods.

Zhengzhou Railway was the first of the five Ministry of Railways bureaus to deploy the Nortel solution.

"We provide a strategic transportation hub for central China's Henan province to connect China's inner provinces with coastal areas and issue over 200,000 tickets each day during peak travel time," said Bao Shenghua, Zhengzhou Railway. "With the support of the Nortel solution, we easily handled the huge number of extra tickets required to serve customers during the high-volume 2006 Chinese New Year and May Day holidays."

"Well over a billion Chinese citizens choose rail travel over other means of transportation every year, especially during the three, week-long public holiday periods," said Stephen Tsui, chief operating officer, Greater China, Nortel. "By supporting the MOR in its efforts to improve ticketing and reservation services, Nortel is making a tangible contribution to improving the rail experience for many of China's train travelers."

Nortel Application Switches enable application optimization, delivery and high availability through the use of sophisticated application and device load balancing, intelligent traffic management, application redirection, application-layer security, security acceleration and bandwidth management.

The Application Switches also ensure fail-safe business continuity by eliminating single points of failure in a network, as well as provide inherent multi-layer security features to protect against external and internal security threats without sacrificing network and application performance.