TORONTO - September 9, 1999 - Cisco Systems Canada Co. has announced the design and implementation of a private multicast wide-area network at stox.com, a Vancouver-based provider of custom financial applications and online trading solutions.

The international network and computing platform, based on Cisco Internet Protocol (IP) multicasting technology, enables stox.com to efficiently deliver real-time content services - such as stock market and financial information - to a global subscriber base.

IP multicasting is a bandwidth-conserving technology that reduces traffic by simultaneously delivering a single stream of information to hundreds of thousands of users. Applications that take advantage of multicasting include videoconferencing, corporate communications, distance learning, and distribution of software, stock quotes and news.

"Cisco and stox.com have invested a significant amount of time in intensive systems and application software testing in an effort to deliver rich, multimedia, user-centric services to the financial and investment communities," said Larry Timlick, Manager, Western Region Service Providers, Cisco Systems Canada. "Together, we have created a robust and scalable multicast content delivery service offering highly efficient bandwidth usage not previously possible using unicast delivery techniques. Through this private multicast wide-area network, stox.com is able to realize substantial operational cost savings while its customers are able to access the most up-to-date financial information available."

For stox.com, the new IP multicast network delivery system will help the company to capitalize on the growing market for online financial services. With an explosion in access to trading securities, due mostly to the proliferation of online trading accounts, networks designed to carry data at decade-old levels are unable to deliver data in a true real-time environment where the end-user receives information milliseconds after it is sent from the source.

"Online trading customers want to buy or sell their securities for the price they see on the screen in front of them," said David Owen, chief technology officer, stox.com, Vancouver. "Working closely with Cisco, Stox has built a zero-packet-loss, fully-redundant, compressed multicast network that efficiently and reliably connects directly to the stock exchanges of North America. The result is a private intranet between stox.com's data centres in New York and Vancouver, and the stock exchanges. Our new network provides a major strategic advantage that will benefit our customers both in terms of reliability and the cost savings we will be able to pass along to them."

Multicasting provides significant advantages over unicasting and broadcasting. Unicasting is a simple mechanism for one-to-one communication, but for one-to-many communication it brings the network to its knees due to its huge bandwidth demands. In broadcasting, a single copy of data is sent to every user in the network - this solves the bandwidth problem but is not suitable if only few receivers requested the data.

IP multicasting solves the inherent bottlenecks created when information must be transferred from a single sender to multiple recipients. By sending only one copy of the information to the network and letting the network intelligently replicate the packet only where it needs to, bandwidth and network resources are conserved both on the sending and the receiving ends of a transmission.

Stox.com will also enable technologies such as Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) functionality within Cisco IOS, the common platform that transforms a network into a mission-critical resource. PGM is a reliable multicast transport protocol for applications that require ordered, duplicate-free, multicast data delivery from multiple sources to multiple receivers. PGM guarantees that a receiver in a multicast group either receives all data packets from transmissions and retransmissions, or can detect unrecoverable data packet loss. It is network-layer independent; the Cisco implementation of PGM Router Assist supports PGM over IP.

Stox.com has attained an exceedingly high degree of reliability to its end-users on the Internet through the use of Cisco Local Director and Distributed Director technologies. Together these provide local- and geographically-distributed load sharing across multiple servers to ensure uninterrupted content delivery to subscribers.

About stox.com

Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, stox.com Inc. (VSE:URL) is listed on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. The Company leverages its global private network to deliver solutions for the development of online trading systems, real-time market data and financial information, and private labeled web applications for the online financial community. For more information on products and services, visit www.stox.com

About Cisco Systems Canada Co.

Cisco Systems Inc. is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Cisco is a multinational corporation with more than $12 billion (U.S.) in annual revenues and more than 19,000 employees worldwide. Cisco Systems Canada Co. (formerly Cisco Systems Canada Ltd.) was established by Cisco Systems in 1990. Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, the company has more than 239 employees in Canada with regional sales and services offices in Dartmouth, NS; Moncton, NB; Quebec City, PQ; Montreal, PQ; Ottawa, ON; London, ON; Winnipeg, MB; Calgary, AB; Edmonton, AB; and Vancouver, BC. Cisco Systems also owns a world class research facility, in Kanata, ON.

Cisco produces networking solutions for enterprise organizations, service providers and small/medium businesses. Virtually all Internet traffic travels across Cisco equipment. Cisco also uses the Internet to conduct a substantial amount of its own business. The company provides more than 70 per cent of its customer support over the Internet. Cisco products handled over the Internet have now surpassed the $8 billion (U.S.) mark, making it the world's largest Internet commerce company.

For more information:

• Gillian Hewitt
  Strategic/Ampersand Inc.
  Tel: (416) 961-5595, ext. 428
  ghewitt@cisco.com

• David Pellizzari
  Business Development Manager
  Tel: (800) 797-9999
  (604) 685-3171
  david@stox.com