News Release

Cisco's LightStream 2020 Enterprise ATM Switch Selected by MCI as Customer Premises Switch for Very High Speed Backbone Network (vBNS)

BILLERICA, Mass., April 25, 1995 - Cisco Systems today
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Apr 25, 1995

BILLERICA, Mass., April 25, 1995 - Cisco Systems today announced that MCIhas selected the Cisco LightStream 2020 enterprise ATM switch to supportsupercomputer communications to the very high speed Backbone NetworkService (vBNS), unveiled Monday at the COMDEX exposition in Atlanta.

The vBNS, a new network launched by MCI and the National Science Foundation(NSF), connects the nation's five leading supercomputing centers. Thefirst implementation of a very high speed network using the InternetProtocol (IP), it is expected to provide speeds of more than 600 Mbps byearly 1996. The new network will give scientists the fast communicationthey need to develop national digital libraries, design new drugs, andperform remote diagnoses and medical treatments.

MCI plans to deploy Cisco's LightStream 2020 switches in thesupercomputing centers, where the switches will facilitate high-speed datatransmission across the network.

"Cisco's LightStream 2020 is a key component of vBNS," said Lance Boxer,senior vice president and general manager of data services for MCI BusinessMarkets. "Its sophisticated ATM traffic and buffer management enable us toprovide the level of service and traffic shaping that are necessary to meetthe performance and data integrity needs of our customers."

Ed Kozel, Cisco vice president of business development, said, "We're verypleased that MCI chose Cisco to participate in providing the very highspeed Backbone Network Service. Cisco's LightStream ATM switches, togetherwith MCI's next-generation communications technologies, are the buildingblocks of the emerging switched internetworking services that will take uswell into the next century."

The Cisco LightStream 2020 enterprise ATM backbone switch provides LAN andWAN internetworking for campus and global environments. SupportingEthernet, FDDI, ATM and frame relay, it is ideal for business-criticalapplications requiring data, voice and video. With the industry's mostadvanced traffic shaping and buffer management, the LightStream 2020provides complete control over bandwidth allocation, quality of service(QoS) and congestion avoidance for today's networks and a growthplan asnetworks scale in size and complexity. The QoS functions enable users toguarantee bandwidth and assign high transfer priorities to mission-criticalor time-sensitive traffic flows. Unique "elastic buffers" enable theswitch to manage bursty traffic from a variety of data types whileproviding the quality of service needed to achieve the best utilizationrates available.

Cisco Systems,Inc. is the leading global supplier of enterprisenetworks,including routers, LAN and ATM switches, dial-up access servers and networkmanagement software. These products, integrated by the Cisco InternetworkOperating System(tm) (Cisco IOS(tm)) link geographically dispersedLANs,WANs and IBM networks. Cisco is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and inthe U.S. is traded under the NASDAQ symbol CSCO.