HAMBURG, Germany, May 2, 2002 - Cisco Systems, the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, today announced the deployment of an e-Government network for the City of Hamburg and its government bodies. Cisco's technology is forming the basis of the IP-City backbone which will enable Hamburg to maintain its position as one of Germany's key economic centres and to satisfy the city's growing demands for comprehensive e-Government and e-Learning schemes by its citizens.

The Cisco-based IP City backbone is fundamental in helping the City of Hamburg meet the German Government's objectives of having most of its processes handled electronically by 2005. In addition, many local government entities such as Finance, Justice, the Police and Education have requested multi-bandwidth solutions, both internal, such as SAP, and external in order to build bridges to the citizens of Hamburg and the economy. The City of Hamburg's new network will provide the bandwidth and scalability to enable these applications and communications services.

"As one of Germany's most important economic centres we must lead the way in providing a first class technology infrastructure to our citizens," said Mr. Shahab Behjat, Head of Communication Services at City of Hamburg. "Cisco is a stable and consistent resource, and through the use of its leading-edge technology we are able to progress more quickly towards our e-Government goals."

Cisco worked with German consultancy, ComConsult, to provide a complete metro infrastructure to enable the provision of multi-bandwidth solutions to Hamburg-based government bodies from 100MB to 10GB at the edge. Using high bandwidth Layer 3 switching in the Metro, the Cisco-based solution will be implemented through the deployment of 15 Catalyst 6509 and 30 Cisco 7206VXR routers and SDH as a transport technology.

"This backbone installation at the City of Hamburg is a great example of how important strong relationships are in the public sector and proven experience of installing the right network solutions for e-Government," said Dr. Wolfgang Hackenberg, Director of Operations Government at Cisco Systems. "Cisco is providing the enabling technology to help the City of Hamburg build network-bridges for citizens, national industry and the government."

The City of Hamburg's new backbone will also provide the foundations for further network developments and multi-bandwidth applications, such as IP-telephony, Netflow/Accounting and caching and content strategies.

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