NHC Communications and Ameritech complete three year agreement to supply CityLAN fiber products for LAN speed service provisioning

Business Wire, March 25, 1997

MONTREAL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 25, 1997--NHC Communications Inc. (NHC) recently announced it will supply Ameritech, a leading U.S. Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) with network infrastructure products for the provision of tariffed FDDI services, for an initial three-year period.

Ameritech has adopted, after extensive evaluation, the NHC CityLAN 100 family of FDDI Metropolitan Area Network repeaters, which will be used to support Ameritech's carrier services in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.

CityLAN 100 will interconnect Ameritechs sub-networks within Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, and also provide for Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) deployment. This will provide Ameritech with a highly reliable FDDI service to its growing customer base in the Midwest. Customers, including commercial government departments, school boards and leading financial institutions, will be able to lease high speed, native FDDI links directly from Ameritech.

"Ameritech has undertaken extensive trials with CityLAN 100 since April, 1996 and it has met all our standards for quality and reliability," says Karen Gamperl, who is responsible for Network Product Evaluation Support at Ameritech. "CityLAN 100 will allow us to provide improved network management capabilities for our customers," added Gamperl.

"CityLAN has been developed to specifically meet the needs of the RBOCs as they introduce services to meet customers' needs for secure, reliable and stable solutions to interconnect LANs over long distances at high speeds," said Chris Ketel, NHC's Central Regional Sales Director. "CityLAN is a compact, easy to install solution with many built-in features needed by the carrier for network resilience, error reporting and fault tolerance," added Ketel.

CityLAN 100 is part of NHC's family of native LAN speed, high-integrity solutions which support transmission of Ethernet, Token Ring or FDDI protocols at distances of up to 25 miles (40km) on a singlemode fiber, enabling cross-city fiber links in metropolitan area systems.

Ameritech serves millions of customers in 50 states and 40 countries. Ameritech provides a full range of communications services, including local and long distance telephone, cellular, paging, security monitoring, cable TV, electronic commerce, on-line services, and more. One of the world's 100 largest companies, Ameritech (www.ameritech.com) has 65,000 employees, one million shareholders and $23 billion in assets.

NHC's corporate vision is to be a leading developer of products that increase the competitive edge of its customers by applying innovative technology approaches to the delivery of high-speed mixed media switched access and transmission networks. NHC is committed to delivering to its customers superior solutions for physical layer network infrastructures.

NHC sells through leading resellers supported by sales locations in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Richmond, Va., New York and Montreal. International sales are supported by offices in Paris, York (U.K.), and Singapore.

NHC may be contacted through its web site: www.nhc.com .

CONTACT: NHC Communications Inc.

Alex Brisbourne, 1-800/361-1965

pr@nhc.com, www.nhc.com

or

S&S Public Relations, Inc.

Emily Armanetti, 847/291-1616 Ext. 254

armanettie@hitekpr.com