RCN's commercial group announces several new agreements - Business

Fiber Optics Weekly Update, Feb 6, 2004

RCN announced that its commercial group, RCN Business, has signed several agreements with customers as it continues to expand its revenue base. While predominantly focused on the residential market, RCN's MegaBand network provides business customers with reliable service while also delivering great value. RCN offers services such as voice, video, data, business cable, Internet access, transport, web hosting, and collocation to a growing list of business customers, including universities, hospitals, and the financial and legal communities.

RCN Business will provide a 30 Mbps transport circuit between the two hotels, as well as a 3 Mbps Ethernet connection from each Chicago hotel to the Internet. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company has hotels and resorts in North America, Europe, the Caribbean, South America, Asia, Africa, Mexico, and the Middle East. As the world's leading operator of luxury hotels and resorts, Four Seasons currently manages 58 properties in 27 countries, primarily under the Four Seasons and Regent brands.

RCN announced an extension of the Columbia University dark fiber backbone ring it constructed for the University in 2001. The ring connects multiple university locations, including Columbia's Technology Center.

RCN will deliver network access that will allow FiberNet Telecom Group Inc. to meet the demands for network capacity in the Northeast. FiberNet deploys, owns and operates fiber optic networks designed to provide comprehensive broadband connectivity to other telecommunications service providers for their data, voice and video transmissions.

RCN will lease dark fiber to Partners Healthcare, in which a portion of RCN's high capacity fiber optic network will be utilized to implement a Wide Area Network (WAN) connecting the system's two main hospitals and data center.

RCN announced a contract to provide the Washington, D.C. university with a 100 Mbps ethernet circuit, which will be used to expand their research capabilities by providing high-speed access to over 200 United States colleges and universities over the Internet2 Abilene network. Connection to the Abilene network is made through the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), and aggregates 26 institutions and all of NetWork Virginia, delivering their Internet traffic over a 2.4-Gigabit-per-second connection. This connection will also provide Catholic University with high-speed access to worldwide networks through Internet2 peering agreements.