SAN JOSE, Calif., December 4, 2000 - Cisco Systems, Inc., the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, today announced that Beijing Telecom, China Telecom, China Netcom, Chongqing Telecom, Citic Pacific, Korea Telecom, SK Telecom, Swiftel and Tianfu Online have all chosen Cisco's 12000 Series Internet Routers to build highly scalable, services-rich Internet backbones in China, Australia, and Korea.

As a cornerstone of Cisco's IP+Optical architecture, the Cisco 12000 Series Internet Router provides up to 320 gigabits per second (Gbps) of switching capacity for extremely high scalability to match the growing demands of IP backbone traffic. The 12000 series offers advanced IP and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology to enable Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and advanced traffic engineering functions to maximize network bandwidth utilization. Cisco's IP+Optical architecture encompasses a complete line of carrier-class equipment for building advanced, next generation Internet infrastructures.

"Cisco is the only equipment provider with the architecture, reliability, and services across a broad product line to both scale the backbone of the Internet and provide revenue-generating services at the edge of the network," said Roland Acra, vice president and general manager of the Public Carrier IP group at Cisco. "With the complete family of equipment including the Cisco 12000 Series Internet Router, and the Cisco 10000 Edge Services Router, and our rapidly growing family of data-optimized optical transport solutions, we are providing Asia Pacific customers the ability to deliver high margin, value-added IP services everywhere."

Innovative services for business customers

With Cisco 12000 Series Internet Routers forming the core of their IP backbones, Asia Pacific service providers are able to easily upgrade their networks with higher speeds and differentiated services to meet the growing needs of businesses and private customers. Examples of these differentiated services include: integrated voice (Voice over IP), Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), Web hosting, content delivery networks, and unified messaging services.

The Cisco 12000 Series Internet Routers' distributed architecture enables a superior level of scalability and advanced, differentiated IP services at the highest speeds of the Internet backbone. Operationally, the result is a simpler network POP (Point of Presence) design that consumes less power and supports a breadth of interfaces including Packet over SONET/SDH (POS), Gigabit Ethernet, Dynamic Packet Transport (DPT) and ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). The 12000 Series delivers the industry's most advanced class of service offering with true QoS support for IP or MPLS functionality enabling delivery of revenue generating IP services such as VoIP, VPNs, multimedia, and high bandwidth content delivery.