MCI ANNOUNCES FRAME RELAY ACCESS TO MCI MAIL AND X.400; Provides Businesses With Better Messaging Performance.

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 10, 1996--MCI today announced that it can now provide higher speed access to many of its corporate MCI Mail customers through its HyperStream Frame Relay service. With this new capability, MCI's messaging customers can achieve substantially improved performance over existing service levels.

"MCI HyperStream Frame Relay gives our corporate MCI Mail and XChange 400 customers a very scaleable, high speed access to the secure, public messaging environment of X.400," said Martha Hanlon, MCI's director of messaging marketing. "XChange 400 is MCI Mail's X.400 service which provides message exchange with other like X.400 electronic mail systems. With HyperStream Frame Relay's speed, flexibility, and interoperability with TCP/IP, customers can now fit their X.400 access into their existing TCP/IP data networks and enjoy interoperability with other applications. Compared to X.25 access which is limited to a maximum of 56 kilobits per second (Kbps), frame relay provides them with higher performance and increased speed ranging from 64Kbps to 1.544 megabits per second (Mbps). And the ordering is simple -- customers simply order additional permanent virtual circuits (PVCs) to access networkMCI Messaging's XChange 400 message switching service.

"Additionally, frame relay customers can benefit by using MCI XChange 400 and all of its network interconnections with more than 80 electronic mail systems worldwide in more than 75 countries," said Hanlon. "This is one of the most secure and reliable methods of interconnection with other worldwide private electronic mail systems."

MCI's HyperStream Frame Relay service leads the industry providing its customers with the highest quality service -- greatest throughput, lowest latency, greatest range of access alternatives, most flexible pricing options and fastest installation time in the industry. In addition to X.400, MCI's HyperStream Frame Relay is interoperable with EDI, ISDN, ATM, private line, and packet networks.

MCI's XChange 400 service interconnects with almost all of the worldwide public electronic mail systems and also offers all of the other delivery services of MCI Mail -- telex, fax, postal and courier delivery. As a delivery option, XChange 400 enables MCI Mail customers using the existing MCI connectivity products (PC user agents and other gateways) to exchange messages with the X.400 community without purchasing any additional hardware or software.

X.400 is the international standard for interconnection of message handling systems (MHS) as defined by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) formally referred to CCITT. XChange 400 is based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Implementation Agreements for the 1984, 1988 and 1993 ITU X.400 Recommendations.

MCI, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is one of the world's largest and fastest growing diversified communications companies. With annual revenue of more than $15 billion, MCI offers consumers and businesses a broad portfolio of services including long distance, wireless, local, paging, messaging, Internet, information services, outsourcing, and advanced global communications.

CONTACT: MCI Telecommunications

C. David Sutton or John R. Houser

800/644-NEWS