ZyXEL
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Public (TWSE: 3704) | |
| Industry | Networking hardware |
| Founded | 1989 |
| Headquarters | Hsinchu, Taiwan |
Key people | Dr. Shun-I Chu |
| Products | Switches, Routers, Firewalls, VoIP Telephones, Modems |
| Revenue | US$466 million |
Number of employees | 1000+ |
| Slogan | Make the World Connect |
| Website |
www |
ZyXEL Communications Corp. Founded in 1989, with over a quarter-century of innovations, ZyXEL Communications Corp. is a world-class networking company providing comprehensive and reliable Internet solutions. Delivering cutting-edge communications innovations to more than 400,000 businesses and 100 million consumers worldwide, today ZyXEL is one of the few companies in the world capable of offering complete networking solutions on broadband access, commercial networking, and home connectivity for Telcos, business, and home users. With a strong local presence in 150 markets around the world, ZyXEL is the ideal partner to deliver tailor-made solutions to meet customers’ local needs.
Corporate history
1988 - ZyXEL founder, Dr. Shun-I Chu, starts the business in Taoyuan County, Taiwan in 1988. Dr. Chu rents an apartment in Taoyuan as a lab and starts to develop an analog modem in 1988.
1989 - Headquarters is established at Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan in 1989.
1992 - World’s 1st Integrated voice/fax/modem
1995 - World’s 1st Analog/ digital ISDN modem
2004 - World’s 1st ADSL2+ gateway
2005 - World’s 1st palm-sized portable personal firewall
2009 - World’s 1st Gigabit active fiber & Telco-grade IPv6 end to end solution
2010 - World’s 1st Carbon footprint verification on the VDSL2 CPE product
2014 - World’s 1st UMTS 802.11ac compatible small cell CPE
2015 - Garners 13th Consecutive Best Taiwan Global Brands Award
The history of the name and pronunciation
When ZyXEL unveiled its first chip-design (ZyXEL was originally a modem-chip design company) back in the late 1980s, the company only had a Chinese name (pronounced Her-Chin = "people work together very hard"). So it had to come up with an English name for a trade show in Asia. The original idea was ZyTEL ("Zy" means nothing, "TEL" for telecommunications). The problem was that someone already had this name announced for the show. So they played around with the letters and came up with ZyXEL instead.
The name does not actually mean anything, although some people claim "XEL" is a word-play on "excellence".
The next challenge was how to pronounce it (everybody in the company was Chinese at that time).
So they fed the name into an old speech synthesizer (reportedly it was an Amiga). And the synthesizer pronounced it "Zai-Cell".
See also
- List of companies of Taiwan
- List of device bandwidths
- ZyNOS - operating system for ZyXEL network devices.
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to ZyXEL. |