From Global Crossing:
Global Crossing Network Centre Established In London Docklands
New $35 million control center for worldwide fiber optic telecommunications network.
Major traffic node and customer equipment site for Pan European Crossing Network.
State-of-the-art operating system sets up global communication links rapidly and provides management oversight from one central point.
$6.4 billion optical fiber Internet protocol based network will link 170 cities worldwide.
London, England September 16, 1999 Global Crossing (Nasdaq GLBX) which is building and operating the world's first and most advanced global IP-based datacentric network, today announced activation of its international control center supporting the Global Crossing Network. The $35 million Global Crossing Network Centre is situated in the fast-growing business area of London's Docklands.
The London center includes the network operations center, designed and equipped to manage and maintain stateoftheart terrestrial and submarine connections. The $6.4 billion Global Crossing Network – built, owned and managed by Global Crossing – will link 170 cities and 24 countries via a network spanning 95,347 announced and approved route miles. Global Crossing's pending merger with U.S.-based Frontier Corporation, expected to close at the end of September, will add additional cities and 20,000 additional route miles to the network.
"The broadband offered by the Global Crossing Network is needed now in Europe and around the world," said Dr. David Lee, Global Crossing President and Chief Operating Officer. "It is needed by the highcapacity voice, data, video and Internet transmissions driving international communications in fields such as business, education, entertainment and research in the next millennium. The Global Crossing Network Centre delivers and consolidates the network management infrastructure capability necessary both to manage and maintain growth of the global network."
Added Dr. Lee: "Our goal is to provide open, end-to-end access to worldwide broadband communications at very competitive prices. Our network is free of the constraints of the oldstyle model filled with legacy systems, complicated consortia agreements and multiple interconnection charges."
Assignment and provisioning of international services is managed direct from the operations center itself. Global Crossing can quickly establish services for customers. Telehousing, webhosting, and co-location services are also available.
"This means that a firm based in France, for example, will be able to establish voice, video and Internet services to subsidiaries in Germany, Hong Kong, and the U.S.A. far more quickly, securely and costeffectively than going via a national telco or an international consortium with partial global coverage," Dr. Lee explained. "This latter way can be timeconsuming and failureprone due to countrytocountry bureaucracy and the need to harmonise different management architectures and subregional networks."
The Global Crossing Network controlled from the network operations center is allnew, so its use of new technologies such as dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) allows real future upgradeability rather than extending the life of existing systems. Utilizing the state-of-the-art operating systems provided by Lucent, the central control from the operations center provides a lean, efficient organization which reduces overheads to customers and solves problems quickly.
The company's worldwide citytocity terrestrial fiber network will have fully redundant automatic failsafe paths onto other sectors of the Global Crossing Network. For example, the PanEuropean Crossing (PEC) network will consist of five rings each of which is "selfhealing" and, in the unlikely event of a failure, traffic will be automatically routed away from the failure via switching protection technology.
Wally Dawson, Global Crossing's Senior Vice President, Operations, explained, “The network and regional operations centers in London will deliver to customers the best provisioning and maintenance performance in the industry. Our technological capability and our commitment to performance will make this possible.”
Phase 1 of Global Crossing's network in Europe will be in service by year-end 1999, linking cities in the UK, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Global Crossing's Irish Ring from Land's End in the UK expands the network to Dublin. Phase 2 will bring in Italy and more cities in France and Germany and provide scope for expansion into Spain, Sweden, Norway and elsewhere in Europe.
"The demand in the European market is enormous, with the intraEuropean bandwidth market alone estimated at $15 billion a year and predicted to continue at double digit growth for several years," said Wim Huisman, president Global Crossing Europe. "That's why we're investing well over $800 million dollars in this very robust, futureproof European network, and why we situated our network center at the most technologically sophisticated European gateway right here in London."
Global Crossing customers include Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom, France Telecom, KPN, BT, as well as Cable & Wireless, AT&T, MCI Worldcom, and USALink.
The network operations center will also manage and provision services for Asia Global Crossing, Global Crossing's new joint venture with Microsoft and Softbank that will provide advanced networkbased telecommunications services to businesses and consumers throughout Asia. It will also manage and provision services for Frontier Corporation (NYSE: FRO), a leading Internet Protocol (IP) applications and communications services provider which has recently agreed to merge with Global Crossing Ltd.
Global Crossing's unsurpassed worldwide network, when combined with Frontier's U.S. fiber optic network, will connect more than 200 of the largest business centers worldwide and will offer industry-leading capabilities in Web hosting, IP applications and data services to customers worldwide over the first seamless global IP network
About Global Crossing
Global Crossing is building and operating the world's most advanced global IPbased datacentric network, an endtoend fiber optic platform for data, voice, video and Internet transmissions. The Global Crossing Network will span five continents and address 80% of the world's international traffic. A new unit of Global Crossing, Global Marine Systems Limited, possesses the largest fleet of cable laying and maintenance vessels in the world and currently services more than a third of the world's undersea cable kilometres. Global Crossing's operations are headquartered in Hamilton, Bermuda, with executive offices in Los Angeles.
Statements made in this press release that state the company's or management's intentions, beliefs, expectations, or predictions for the future are forwardlooking statements. It is important to note that the company's actual results could differ materially from those projected in such forwardlooking statements. Information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forwardlooking statements is contained from time to time in the company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Copies of these filings may be obtained by contacting the company or the SEC.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Press contact UK:
David Cunliffe/Paul Bond
Key Communications
2-16 Goodge Street
London W1P 1FF
+44 (0)20 7580 0222
+44 (0)20 7580 0333
davic@keycommunications.co.uk
paulb@keycommunications.co.uk Investors and analysts may contact:
Jensen Chow
310/385-5283
E-mail: jchow@globalcrossing.com
Reporters and editors may contact:
Tom Goff
310/385-5231
E-mail: tgoff@globalcrossing.com
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