Infonet Services Corp and one of its larger shareholders, the Deutsche Bundespost Telekom have formed a joint venture company to market and sell the former’s global communication services to the German market. Called Infonet Network Services Deutschland, the venture will be 80% owned by Telekom, and will also be responsible for the maintenance and expansion of the Infonet network in Germany. It will provide the full range of Infonet’s services, including wide area networking, local net to local net internetworking, facilities management, and integration of disparate messaging systems. Until now, Infonet’s local organisation in Frankfurt has handled customer installation and ongoing support, while the Bundespost’s Interpak organisation based in Koblenz has been responsible for marketing and sales distribution. These entities are now to be consolidated into the new company. The partners are forecasting rapid expansion, bullishly saying that they expect it to double in size by the end of the year. To support this prediction, they say that the market for international value-added network services in Germany has more growth potential than in any other European country. Access to the Infonet network in Germany is currently available via nodes in Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Dusseldorf, Hamburg and Stuttgart, as well as from Germany’s DATEX-P public data network. The companies says that this will be expanded throughout 1993, to provide higher speeds and multiprotocol access to the network from other German cities.
