Business Services Industry

Cisco 7600 Series Routers Power BellSouth Premium Metro Ethernet Network Services

Business Wire, July 6, 2004

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cisco Systems' Infrastructure Enables Service-Driven Network for BellSouth to Deliver Differentiated Business Services

Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO) today announced that BellSouth has begun deployment of a network solution from Cisco Systems to support the BellSouth(R) Metro Ethernet Premium Service, a recent expansion to the company's innovative Metro Ethernet service portfolio. The new Premium Service is enabled by the Cisco 7600 Series routers and offers businesses the ability to support bandwidth intensive solutions such as data and storage center connectivity, business continuity, sharing of medical and technical imaging and video and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

"The architectural flexibility of Cisco's routers gives BellSouth the ability to offer a portfolio of differentiated, premium Ethernet services, while our customers gain operational efficiency and increase productivity," said Mark Kaish, BellSouth's vice president of Next Generation Solutions. "The enhanced Ethernet services help meet the customer demand to run customized, high bandwidth applications that support network convergence and interactive applications."

The Cisco 7600 Series routers are equipped with Cisco's Supervisor Engine 720 modules with switching capacities of 720 Gigabits per second (Gbps). The Quality of Service (QoS) and high availability capabilities of the Supervisor 720 enable BellSouth to offer service level agreement (SLA) commitments to its Premium Service customers in the areas of network latency, availability and time-to-repair. The advanced QoS capability and 10 Gigabit Ethernet support provided by the Supervisor Engine 720 allows Premium Service traffic to receive priority treatment. This helps enable differentiated business services tailored to voice and video applications.

"With the deployment of the Cisco 7609, BellSouth is benefiting from a proven, reliable metro Ethernet network infrastructure that provides service richness and industry leading metro technologies, including burstable bandwidth and high availability," said Praveen Akkiraju, director of marketing, broadband edge and midrange routing business unit at Cisco. "With the multiple application support provided by the Cisco 7609, BellSouth can offer businesses a wider range of metro transport services."

About BellSouth Corporation

BellSouth Corporation is a Fortune 100 communications company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and a parent company of Cingular Wireless, the nation's second largest wireless voice and data provider

Backed by award winning customer service, BellSouth offers the most comprehensive and innovative package of voice and data services available in the market. Through BellSouth Answers, residential and small business customers can bundle their local and long distance service with dial up and high speed DSL Internet access, satellite television and Cingular(R) Wireless service. For businesses, BellSouth provides secure, reliable local and long distance voice and data networking solutions. BellSouth also offers online and directory advertising through BellSouth(R) RealPages.com and The Real Yellow Pages(R).

More information about BellSouth can be found at http://www.bellsouth.com.

About Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Information on Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For daily news, go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

For more information on the Cisco 7600 Series routers and the Cisco metro Ethernet portfolio, go to www.cisco.com/go/metro.>