London, UK - May 30, 2002, Cisco Systems, the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, and 510, the telecoms infrastructure business recently set up by London Electricity Group (LE Group), announced that they will co-operate to drive forward the market for Ethernet services in London. 510 and Cisco will work together to develop London-based Ethernet solutions that can be marketed via Cisco's existing channel infrastructure. 510 will implement Cisco's Metro Ethernet Switching portfolio to deliver Gigabit Ethernet over Fibre to business customers in the London area. This service will provide customers with a flexible next?generation broadband service that can scale from 10Mbps up to Gigabit Ethernet and beyond.

510 has laid a fibre optic ring network around London and will take advantage of its relationship with LE Group to provide fibre links in the 'last mile' to business customers and carriers. Combining this widespread fibre infrastructure with Cisco's Metro Ethernet Switching solutions will help enable 510 to deliver 'Ethernet to the Building' solutions using a Metropolitan Area Network in London. 510 can offer customers exceptional access opportunities through LE Group's 30,000kms of electricity network infrastructure in, around and under London. Access to this network of ducts will help 510 in laying direct last mile fibre links to its customers.

"Providing Ethernet-based connectivity over optical fibre means that the standard for business connectivity on London now starts at 10 Mbps," commented Cliff Walton, managing director of 510. "Ethernet is well understood within the enterprise business community as the de facto standard for internal desktop connectivity, and it makes perfect sense to extend that infrastructure for connections to the outside world. Cisco is the leading supplier of Ethernet network equipment and is a natural partner for 510."

Using Cisco's Metro Ethernet Switching portfolio will help allow 510 to effectively manage the capacity supplied to customers through software without the need for 'forklift upgrades' required to upgrade voice networks. Combining Metro Ethernet with Metro IP will help provide network resilience and provide a platform for delivering services such as IP telephony, e-learning, IP video surveillance, and video broadcast between customer sites.

"510 is developing a service to address the 'bandwidth gap' issue faced by most London companies - no other entrant has 510's ability to build access infrastructure in the London area," commented Nigel Moulton, director NSP and Metro Ethernet, EMEA for Cisco. "Whilst enterprises benefit from high-speed LAN connectivity internally, and service providers traditionally have over-capacity in the core, the access network forms a bottleneck. Ethernet and fibre provides an attractive offer to end customers to address this issue."

With access to 17,000 secure and managed properties around London, 510 has access to suitable locations to host Points of Presence (PoPs) for its IP-based fibre network. It will deploy Cisco's Catalyst 7600 platform to act as PoPs for the aggregation of Gigabit Ethernet connections from customers around London, together with the Cisco ONT 1031 Optical Network Termination device or Cisco Catalyst 3550 platform at customer sites.

"Cisco has a proven track record of working with service providers, utility companies and local authorities in Europe to help deliver Ethernet-based connectivity in the first mile," concluded Cliff Walton of 510. "Collaborating with Cisco will help accelerate the roll out of these services to SMBs, enterprises and carriers around London and provide 510 with valuable expertise in the marketing and tendering of tailored broadband Ethernet solutions to potential customers."

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