Cox Communications Creates New National IP Backbone With Cisco Solutions.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 7, 2002

Cisco 12400 and 7600 Internet Routers and Cisco

Catalyst(R) 6500 Switches Chosen for New Network to

Deliver Next Generation Voice and Data Services

Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO), the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, announced today that Cox Communications, Inc., is deploying Cisco Internet routers and switches to satisfy the rapidly increasing demand from its greater than three-quarters of a million customers for high-value IP services such as content delivery, and Virtual Private Networks (VPN). Cox chose several Cisco products to support this enormous network expansion. This includes interconnecting Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) using the Cisco 12406 Internet Router in a backbone application and the Cisco 7609 Internet Router and Cisco Catalyst(R) 6509 and 6513 switches to support its regional and service data centers. In addition, Cox has selected the market-leading ONS 15454 Metro Optical Transport Platform at many of these interconnection sites to enable maximum service density of voice and data services.

The Cisco 12406 and Cisco 7609 are part of Cisco's Next Generation Internet Routing portfolio, delivering innovative products and technologies that enable customers to cost-effectively scale their packet networks to serve more users with an increasingly rich set of services and significantly greater total traffic volumes, both more profitably and reliably.

The Cisco solution enables Cox to enhance scalability of its investment by purchasing routers and switches designed to expand with the network growth demands while preserving today's investment. High speed Internet service is an integral component of Cox's product offerings, and Cox is dedicated to maintaining and growing this successful business.

"Cisco was a natural choice to help us build our next generation network," explained Jay Rolls, vice president of data engineering for Cox Communications. "Cisco and Cox have enjoyed a long standing successful relationship dating back to our days pioneering the DOCSIS standard. We've chosen Cisco to fulfill a key part of our network build-out, as we know we can rely on them for superior technology leadership and innovation."

Rolls continued, "The breadth of Cisco products involved in the Cox network prepare us to easily deploy and offer premium services over our high capacity IP network. The ability to classify this premium traffic and meet strict service level agreement parameters was an important factor in our decision to choose Cisco."

The Cisco 12406 Internet Router is the only one-quarter-rack router in the industry that supports 10G (10 Gigabits per second) interfaces such as OC-192/STM-64. It delivers five times the performance of the nearest competitor and is part of the Cisco 12000 Series Internet Routers that offer the industry's highest performance and scalability -- two critical features that will enable Cox Communications to expand its customer base through rapid deployment of commercial business services to multiple sites. Quality of service (QoS) capabilities played an important part in Cox's decision to choose Cisco. The demonstrated priority packet delivery capabilities of the 12000 series ensure that VoIP and other premium content packets are transported without loss and with the lowest latency and jitter.

"Cox has been a great driver with Cisco in the development of innovative technologies," said Tony Bates, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Internet POP Systems Business Unit. "We look forward to continuing this relationship to help Cox deliver additional services that will improve their business and offer more value to their customers. "

The Cisco 12000 Series Internet Router is part of Cisco's family of multimillion packets-per-second (pps) Internet routing platforms for creating a full service network. The Cisco 12000 Series is the premier Internet routing platform for service provider backbone and high-speed edge applications and enables service providers to meet the challenge of building IP networks to satisfy customer demands while increasing profitability. The Cisco 12000 Series offers the industry's only portfolio 10Gbps OC-192/STM-64 systems and delivers the capacity, performance, service enablers, and operational efficiencies to build the most competitive IP networks. With its unique, modular distributed system architecture, the Cisco 12000 Series leads the industry with the only proven investment protection, the highest backbone and edge performance, and the only priority packet delivery. This innovative combination of features and capabilities make the Cisco 12400 family the premier platform for building true 10Gbps OC-192/STM-64 IP+Optical infrastructures.

Cox is deploying multiple Cisco 7609 Series Internet Routers at the distribution layer of each of its Regional Data Centers to support redundant metro aggregation for multiple cable systems in the network. The Cisco 7600 Series Internet Router is the highest performance member of Cisco's midrange router offerings. At 30 Mpps, the Cisco 7600 offers exceptional performance in a service-rich midrange edge router, helping enterprises and service providers increase their profits though reduced costs and new revenue from IP services. The Cisco 7600 Series delivers extensive IP service offerings using Cisco's adaptive network processor technology, the widest range of POP applications, and the highest density DS3, OC-3c and OC-12 (more than twice the interface density of nearest competitor). Cisco 7600 Series routers can scale WAN connectivity from DS0 to OC-48, which was a key factor for Cox as it looks to scale its network. The Cisco 7600 Series was Cisco's first platform to support Ethernet over MPLS, and also supports MPLS and MPLS QoS. It allows service providers to offer differentiated services and quality guarantees, and empowers them to build scalable and unified networks for their different enterprise customer requirements.

Cox also is using the market-leading Cisco Catalyst 6509 and recently introduced Catalyst 6513 in each of its Service Data Centers, to provide connectivity for all network devices in their data centers network wide. Part of the Cisco 6000 family of switches, the Catalyst 6500 series switch delivers high-performance, multilayer switching solutions designed to address the increased requirements for gigabit scalability in backbone/distribution and server-aggregation environments. The Catalyst 6513 offers industry-leading scalable switching performance with up to 256 Gbps bandwidth and up to 210 Mpps aggregate local switching, with leading densities of 1152 10/100 and 388 Gigabit ports per 7-inch rack. By combining superior control-plane and packet-forwarding scalability with a rich set of intelligent services, the Catalyst 6500 series delivers the foundation for new-world networking solutions, such as converged voice/video/data and e-commerce services.

The Cisco ONS 15454, part of the extensive Cisco Complete Optical Multiservice Edge and Transport (COMET) portfolio, delivers supercharged SONET from OC-3 to OC-192 along with integrated optical networking for maximum service capacity, and the industry's greatest service variety including DS-1, DS-3, OC-N, OC-Nc, Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, and Gigabit Ethernet. Increasing service density in the metro, the ONS 15454 enables service providers to efficiently and cost-effectively pack OC-48s and OC-192s for profitable service delivery. The Cisco COMET product line offers maximum service velocity, density, variety, and capacity, building the foundation to accelerate IP+Optical networking.

About Next Generation Internet Routing

Cisco's next generation Internet routers, the full series of Cisco 7300, 7400, 7600, 10000, 10700 and the 12000, are a family of multimillion packets-per-second (pps) IP platforms for creating service-enabled Internets. These products deliver the highest performance, availability, operational efficiency, and greatest level of service for increasing service provider profitability and reducing operational costs across a variety of applications including: broadband aggregation, managed CPE, leased line aggregation, metro IP, Internet Data Centers, edge and backbone.

About Cisco

Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. News and information are available at www.cisco.com. Cisco, Cisco Systems, the Cisco Systems logo, and Cisco IOS are registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. in the U.S. and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.