Cupertino Electric to Build Electrical Infrastructure for First High-Speed Internet Link to Latin America.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 15, 2001

NAP of the Americas Under Construction in Miami to Provide Tier-1

Carrier-Neutral Connection Between North and South America 

Silicon-Valley based Cupertino Electric, Inc. (CUPE) announced today that it has been selected by Terremark Worldwide Inc. (AMEX:TWW), a global leader in Internet infrastructure and managed services, to build the electrical infrastructure for the NAP of the Americas, the first Tier-1 NAP strategically located to serve as an international Internet gateway connecting North and South America. The project is owned and operated by Terremark Worldwide Inc.

The NAP, or network access point, an Internet exchange that provides interconnection between global telecommunications carriers, ISPs and others, will handle Internet traffic between the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe into the U.S. Cupertino Electric will design, engineer, install, and commission all the electrical infrastructure for the NAP of the Americas, a buildout that will comprise more than 60% of the total scope of the project.

Cupertino Electric is a leading provider of sophisticated electrical infrastructure solutions that offer high quality, reliable power, and speed-to-market for mission-critical facilities such as Internet data centers. Cupertino Electric has designed, built and commissioned the electrical infrastructure requirements for more telecommunications and Internet data center floor space than any contractor in the country.

The NAP of the Americas will be housed in downtown Miami in Terremark's Technology Center of the Americas (TECOTA), a 750,000 square foot telecommunications hotel that is built to withstand a Level 5 Hurricane. The NAP of the Americas, a 120,000 square-foot facility in TECOTA, will provide carrier-neutral connectivity, public and private peering, colocation space and a menu of managed services.

The NAP of the Americas will be the world's fifth official Tier-1 network access point. Others are located in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. The crowded state of the existing NAPs has generated much demand and interest from the telecommunication industry for the new facility. The NAP of the Americas will be operational in summer 2001.

The NAP of the Americas will be the world's first super-exchange that is "carrier-neutral." This means that it is owned and operated by a non-carrier, Terremark Worldwide, and backed by the NAP of the Americas Consortium, made up of over 85 top telecommunications industry members and educational institutions, instead of being operated by only a single carrier as are the original four NAPs.

According to Terremark Worldwide Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Monty Bannerman, Cupertino Electric was selected because of its "reduced-time-to-market solution, its leading-edge engineering innovations, and its loyal vendor and electrical products supply chain relationships. Cupertino together with our 'best of breed' technology partners bring to the NAP the most advanced networking technologies."

Cupertino Electric's build-out methodology applies parallel processing to design, implementation planning and installation, giving it reduced-time-to-market delivery. Cupertino Electric also offers revenue enhancement to its customers through the use of innovative backup generators in configurations that the company helped to design.

Every data center including the NAP of the Americas requires reliable and redundant electrical power. Conventional power backup systems use large banks of batteries to bridge a voltage sag from the utility before diesel-powered generators can come online.

Cupertino Electric designs installations with advanced backup generators that are engineered with low-profile flywheels that store energy to bridge the voltage sag. By eliminating the mountainous banks of backup battery equipment, Cupertino Electric's designs can increase the amount of usable revenue-generating space within data centers by an average of 5% or more.

In the case of the NAP of the Americas, Cupertino Electric was able to add 5,600 square feet of valuable revenue-generating floor space when compared with the original program, a space enhancement that will potentially add millions of dollars to the NAP of the Americas' annual revenue model. Bannerman added, "Cupertino's distinctive ability to apply value engineering to help maximize the NAP's usable square footage and revenue potential was a key reason for selecting them."

Cupertino Electric offers arguably the most sophisticated, rigorous Internet infrastructure commissioning and testing in the country. The commissioning process is a highly technical three- to six-week procedure that tests an installation to near fail-safe specifications. During the commissioning process, Cupertino Electric tests each aspect of the data center for failure, duplicating many factory tests, and provides system testing and integrated building testing.

In addition to the design and implementation of backup electrical systems with multiple layers of redundancy, Cupertino Electric offers other creative energy solutions to its data center clients that increase both power quality and reliability. These include the ability to build a private substation, or an on-site stand-alone distributed power generation system, to completely insulate customers from the overburdened utility grid and volatile generation markets.