SAN JOSE, Calif. - September 28, 2004 - Cisco Systems today announced that OneNet is deploying the Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) to increase network capacity, reliability and resiliency. This expansion will afford OneNet the ability to converge its legacy SONET services with new Ethernet services and offer regional access to the National LambdaRail (NLR).

NLR is a major initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications.

"We chose to deploy the Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP because we needed to converge our existing OC-12 SONET network and our new Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet services into a single network while increasing the network's reliability," said Kurt Snodgrass, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Telecommunications at OneNet - Oklahoma's official telecommunications network and an operational division of the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. "The ONS 15454 was really the only option we would consider, as it provided the most economical and efficient means to consolidate our existing SONET infrastructure with our new high-speed Ethernet services on a single SONET/DWDM platform. The ONS 15454 is able to provide DS-1 to 10GE services in one seamless platform."

By deploying the Cisco ONS 15454, OneNet is improving research capabilities by adding line-rate, 10 Gigabit Ethernet LAN PHY wavelengths to connect to the NLR. The network is not only providing network services to Oklahoma colleges and universities, but also commoditizing both Internet and Internet2 to the University of Arkansas and Arkansas State higher education systems.

"The Cisco ONS 15454 uses unified software to combine our legacy SONET infrastructure and our new DWDM services, benefiting us by greatly reducing our need for a large operations group," added Snodgrass.

For more information on OneNet, visit: http://www.onenet.net/index.htm.

For more information on all of Cisco's optical networking solutions, visit: http://www.cisco/go/optical.