Wall Street Journal Shareholder Scoreboard Ranks F5 First in Telecommunications Equipment Industry Group; F5 Tops Industry Group with a Five-Year Average Return of 43 Percent

Business Wire, March 1, 2006

SEATTLE -- F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that it has earned the No. 1 position in the Wall Street Journal's "Shareholder Scoreboard" for the Telecommunications Equipment Industry Group, based on a five-year average return. At 43 percent, F5's five-year average return was nearly 20 percentage points higher than the company ranked No. 2 on the scoreboard. F5's peer industry(1) group's five-year average return was (-) 5.3 percent.

The Wall Street Journal Shareholder Scoreboard highlights the performance of 1,000 major US companies compared with their peers in 76 industry groups. The WSJ bases its Shareholder Scoreboard rankings on compound annual total returns -- including price changes and reinvestments from any dividends or other cash or noncash distributions -- for periods through year-end 2005. Although the published returns are rounded to the nearest 10th of a percentage point, rankings are based on numbers carried out to at least seven decimal places. Rankings are by L.E.K. Consulting LLC, based on data from Dow Jones & Co., Hemscott, Inc. a division of Hemscott PLC, and SunGard Market Data Services.

"Earning the number one ranking on the Wall Street Journal's Shareholder Scoreboard is another validation of F5's commitment to increasing shareholder value and our success in continuing to meet and exceed our overall corporate goals," said Andy Reinland, SVP and Chief Finance Officer at F5 Networks.

(1) Telecommunications Equipment industry group, comprised of 17 publicly-held U.S. companies.

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking. F5 provides solutions that make applications secure, fast, and available for everyone, helping organizations get the most out of their investment. By adding intelligence and manageability into the network to offload applications, F5 optimizes applications and allows them to work faster and consume fewer resources. F5's extensible architecture intelligently integrates application optimization, protection for the application and the network, and delivers application reliability -- all on one universal platform. Over 9,000 organizations and service providers worldwide trust F5 to keep their applications running. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington with offices worldwide. For more information, go to www.f5.com.

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