PRAGUE, Czech Republic, May 26, 2008 - Cisco today announced that Sloane Park Property Trust, a Czech operator that provides telecommunications and data transit services on a wholesale basis, has built a next-generation transport network (NGTN) based on Cisco's routing and optical networking technologies. The NGTN, spanning more than 1,500 kilometers (about 930 miles), helps provide Sloane Park with greater network capacity and the ability to support secure advanced services integrating voice, video and data.

"Our objective was to build a new backbone across the Czech Republic that serves internal network needs and at the same time helps us to better serve our customers, such as UPC, by providing additional services and higher capacity," said Lubos Otec, chief technology officer of Sloane Park Property Trust.

Sloane Park Property Trust provides telecommunications and data transit services on a wholesale basis to all major service providers and cable TV providers. Sloane Park owns a fiber-optic network installed along oil pipelines and Czech railways routes across the Czech Republic.

"Cisco not only offered a superior technology solution but also created a specific customized design. As a result, we were able to deploy a bidirectional, dense wavelength division-multiplexing (DWDM)-based optical network using a single fiber strand in about 50 percent of our overall network," Otec added.

"Like other major telecommunications providers in Central and Eastern Europe, Sloane Park Property Trust is aware that it needs to move quickly to stay ahead of the competition and is carrying out a top-to-bottom review of its infrastructure," commented Kaan Terzioglu, vice president of Central and Eastern Europe for Cisco. "As one of the critical ingredients in the network foundation, the Cisco® ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) featuring reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexing (ROADM) technology offers Sloane Park the optimum combination of flexibility, capacity and future-proofing," Terzioglu added.

Sloane Park Property Trust's NGTN is equipped with Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform and ONS 15216 products. Cisco 7600 Series Routers provide Gigabit Ethernet aggregation on a metro-network level to support "triple play" service delivery. The backbone upgrade replaces a synchronous digital hierarchy core and supports traffic rates of 10 gigabits per second.