TOKYO, Japan - February 26, 2003 - Cisco Systems, Inc., (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced that The National Institute of Informatics (Chiyoda-ku Hitotsubashi, Tokyo) has completed the international expansion of Japan's Ultra High-Speed Research Network "SuperSINET" equipped with Cisco 12000 Series routers.

SuperSINET is Japan's first 10 Gbps Optical high-speed research network built to drive the academic research activities in Japan by establishing the strong cooperation between major high-tech research institutes, universities or other academic organizations across the world.

By deploying the Cisco 12000 Series routers, academic research networks can offer users Cisco's design for guaranteed priority packet delivery, and the lowest latency available today for real-time service delivery. This enables the high-speed inter-networking between the academic research institutes/organizations in Japan and overseas, providing the infrastructure of the inter-borders communication between the research activities in the high-tech fields like High Energy Physics/Atomic Science, Space Science/Astronomy, Bio-Informatics, GRID, and Nano-Technology. "The Cisco 12000 routers are essential for the continuous evolution of SuperSINET as the world's leading academic network." commented Professor Shoichiro Asano, the leader of SuperSINET project regarding this expansion.

"There is a growing need for high-speed, high capacity networks amongst the academic and research community. Collaborating with this community, especially with NII on the SuperSINET project is a great opportunity for Cisco to develop the next-generation of technologies and services," said Tony Bates, vice president and general manager, High-End Routing Business Unit at Cisco Systems.

NII is deploying Cisco 12000 Series routers as the core routers of 10Gbps MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) backbone of SuperSINET, and is studying the new technologies such as G-MPLS, IPv6 etc in co-operation with Cisco. "SuperSINET is a great example of continued success and innovation around these advanced technologies, and we are very glad to collaborate with Cisco on SuperSINET project," said Professor Shoichiro Asano at NII.

SuperSINET is referred in the "e-Japan project" announced by Government's IT Strategic Committee in March 2001, and operated by the National Institute of Informatics (NII) since January 4th, 2002. NII is going to interconnect SuperSINET with major academic research networks in United States by deploying Cisco 12000 Series routers through high-speed circuits. Cisco solutions and technology provide a complete 10 Gbps router portfolio, proven high availability with integrated Cisco Nonstop Forwarding (NSF) and Cisco Stateful Switchover (SSO), the most comprehensive quality-of-service (QoS) features and integration of IPv6 with IPv4-based functionality available today for real-time service delivery.

For more information about Cisco 12000 Series routers, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/12000

About The National Institute of Informatics (NII)

The National Institute of Informatics (NII), established in April 2000, is an inter-university research institute of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). NII is pursuing a comprehensive and wide-range research program to build the academic field of informatics, with the following seven pillars as the center of its development efforts: information foundation, infrastructure of information systems, software, multimedia, intelligence systems, utilization of information in the research field, and policy for strengthening the ties between information and society. NII is implementing activities utilizing advanced academic information systems derived from its own research results through SuperSINET project.http://www.nii.ac.jp/index.html