This will provide ntl’s retail and wholesale Internet customers with significantly increased protection from spam, viruses and other malicious messaging attacks.

With spam accounting for more than 50 per cent of message traffic globally, messaging ‘abuse’ of all kinds is an important and growing issue for service providers, with a significant impact on customer service, system support and messaging infrastructure costs.

Cable Forum last year (August 2004), contacted Simon Duffy, ntl’s chief executive officer to ask him about the ntlworld e-mail service and why so many customers were experiencing problems. In his reply here, ntl’s ceo explained then, ntl’s intentions to take advantage of two new products that came to market – one which allows customers to manage their spam mail before it gets into their mailbox and another which provides a comprehensive anti-virus capability.

The ability to block abusive messages before they enter the network lies at the heart of Openwave’s Edge Gx Anti-Abuse solution. Designed specifically to address the needs of service providers, it prevents spammer traffic or harmful viruses from infiltrating carrier networks, as well as protecting outbound traffic at risk from zombies and trojans.

The deployment of Edge Gx Anti-Abuse with tightly integrated network edge anti-virus filtering from McAfee marks the successful completion of stage one in ntl’s plan to enhance the overall customer experience. Some twenty million messages have been stopped from entering the ntl network per day.

The next stage will be to implement Brightmail anti-spam filtering technology, also tightly integrated with Openwave Edge Gx, to further enhance customer protection. Openwave’s three-tier combination of intelligent network edge traffic controls, filtering technologies and end-user controls enables service providers to dramatically simplify the overall management and total cost of messaging and anti-abuse systems.

“ntl is working hard to provide the highest possible levels of protection to our customers from spam and viruses,” said Bill Goodland, Director of Internet at ntl. “We have a significant programme in place to enhance the service we offer our internet customers and the partnership with Openwave is integral to this effort. The implementation of Edge Gx Anti-Abuse is a good start, preventing some 20 million messages from entering our network each day. But it’s only the beginning. We intend to introduce additional levels of customer protection and support over the coming months.”

News Source: Openwave.