SAN JOSE, Calif., October 22, 2002 - Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), today celebrates the fifth anniversary of the first network deployment of the Cisco 12000 Series router. First deployed in 1997, the Cisco 12000 was the first router designed and purpose-built to meet the growth and service demands for packet networking. It was also the first to deliver the scalability, reliability and high-performance services needed for IP/MPLS carrier networks. Today, with more than 20,000 units deployed globally, the Cisco 12000 Series has enabled service providers to scale their networks incrementally from 622Mbps to 2.5 Gbps to 10 Gbps, while lowering the total cost of ownership and preserving customers' investment -- making it by far the most broadly deployed high-end platform in the industry.

With its unique modular distributed system architecture, proven high availability, security and scalability features, Cisco 12000 Series routers have helped enable hundreds of carriers such as TDC Tele Danmark, Sprint, Matav, Interoute, Internet2, FastWeb, China Telecom, and Cable & Wireless to affordably and efficiently deliver value-added services and create new revenue streams for bandwidth-intensive services such as application hosting, voice and video.

Sprint was one of the first carriers to deploy Cisco 12000 Series routers into its IP backbone, launching the world's first OC-12 packet-over-SONET (POS) IP network. The Cisco 12000 Series enabled Sprint to continue to stay ahead of rapidly increasing Internet traffic demands. "Sprint has enjoyed a long-term relationship with Cisco, and the Cisco 12000 has provided us with a proven lifecycle of products and technologies capable of helping us grow our network and maximize the value of our initial investment," said Bob Azzi, vice president of Engineering at Sprint. "The Cisco 12000 has helped us to provide our enterprise customers reliable connectivity and services that can meet the most stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and can keep our network congestion-free for delivering the most sensitive data, voice and video traffic."

Using Cisco technology, Cable & Wireless has deployed a global MPLS network based on the Cisco 12000 to deliver the quality of service to support the unique requirements of data, voice and video in a converged environment. "Cable & Wireless has been utilizing the Cisco 12000 as the platform in our expanding global MPLS IP-VPN enterprise network solution for large enterprises that are looking to operate data, voice and video over a single IP network," said Dave Garbin, vice president of Network Strategy at Cable & Wireless. "The proven investment protection of the Cisco 12000 has allowed us to cost effectively expand our converged network services to become even more competitive."

"From the very beginning, our mission has been innovation - not only in terms of the services we supply to our customers, but in the type of technology we use to support them," said Guido Garrone, FastWeb Network Operations Director. "Our decision to select Cisco was a direct result of their leadership in the IP arena. Cisco was able to deliver the key technologies and made it simple for us to set up a service delivery infrastructure for providing our residential customers with innovative Ethernet connectivity for voice, video and data services."

"Our goal is to implement MPLS VPN services, improve the quality of service to our existing and new subscribers and to minimize the operational costs in our networks," said Jinsong Dou, Project Manager of ChinaNet, Anhui Branch, China Telecom. "The Cisco 12000 provides us with the reliability, scalability and flexibility to scale and support these services and to meet our customers expectations while helping to reduce our operational costs."

Cisco 12000 Series -- Industry "Firsts" and Successes

Cisco has a long line of successes and industry firsts dating back to 1997. Today the Cisco 12000 Series router is the principal building block for the world's largest IP/MPLS infrastructures.

• First modular distributed system architecture - enables line-rate performance with minimized traffic disruption and incremental performance upgrades minimizing the need for a forklift upgrade



• Optical internetworking - removes complex and capital intensive layers of equipment to streamline the transport of IP/MPLS traffic over optical transport such as long-haul DWDM, SONET and Ethernet links



• ASIC-based forwarding and services - first to integrate packet forwarding and robust IP/MPLS services into hardware with cutting-edge ASICs and innovative Cisco Adaptive Network Processing (ANP) technology



• Proven high availability - only router that eliminates packet loss in the event of route processor failure, with unique integrated Cisco Nonstop Forwarding (NSF) and Cisco Stateful Switchover (SSO) technologies



• Complete 10 Gbps portfolio - the only complete portfolio of 10 Gbps per slot chassis and interfaces - including Resilient Packet Ring (RPR), packet-over-SONET/SDH and 10 Gigabit Ethernet



• Integrated core and high-end edge functionality - the only system to integrate high-touch edge services with core routing capabilities, reducing complexity and operational costs while increasing performance.

"The inspiration and vision for building the Cisco 12000 Series was fuelled by our customers' demand for a high-speed, 'carrier class' router," said Tony Bates, vice president and general manager, High-End Routing Business Unit at Cisco Systems. "We are pleased with the success the 12000 has brought to our customers over the past five years and look forward to the continued success of our customers and the 12000 Series in the years to come."

For more information on the Cisco 12000 Series platform, please visit www.cisco.com/go/12000)