Year 2000 Wire/Internet Passes Y2K Test With Flying Colors Despite Hype Anticipating Glitches, According To Keynote's Y2K Internet Performance Watch.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 1, 2000

Wrap-Up Report Suggests Nations with Large Internet User

Communities Experienced Sporadic Internet Slow Down

Keynote (NASDAQ:KEYN), the Internet Performance Authority(TM)reports that major web sites and the Internet infrastructure in all time zones performed well as they entered the new year while some web sites with large user communities experienced performance slow downs around the midnight hour.

Minor spikes in performance times in Australia, New Zealand, China, India, South Africa and some European countries, including the Vatican, France and England, are attributed to an increased number of users who apparently logged on to test Internet availability. Other than these transitory spikes in performance around the local midnight hours, there were no obvious Y2K-related performance or availability problems. Keynote measured the performance and availability of the Internet in all global time zones as the year 2000 rolled in around the planet. The public is invited to view the results posted on Keynote's web site at www.keynote.com.

"We're happy to report that Internet sites around the world, from Tonga to Hawaii, received flying colors for performance and availability during the Millennium turnover," said Daniel Todd, Director of Public Services at Keynote. "We owe this success to the small group of computer professionals who have worked for the past three years to ensure a successful transition to the year 2000."

The infrastructure of the Internet is one of the world's largest distributed computing systems. It comprises millions of routers, switches, DNS servers and other specialized computers that manage and carry Internet traffic between World Wide Web sites and user PCs. As the Millennium arrived in each time zone, the web sites and Internet infrastructure in that time zone could have experienced Y2K failures that might have produced a cascading effect on Internet performance and availability.

The selected web sites that Keynote measured for the Keynote Y2K Internet Performance Watch are physically located in all the major time zones across the world, from Tonga in the Pacific on the western side of the international date line to Hawaii on the eastern side. Keynote's measurement computers would have indicated infrastructure malfunctions if web sites in an area became inaccessible.

"Keynote is the only company in a position to provide unbiased Internet performance and availability information for the worldwide Y2K phenomenon," said Umang Gupta, chairman and CEO of Keynote. "We used the same worldwide network of measurement computers that we use daily to provide performance and availability measurement services to the top e-business web sites."

The web sites measured for the Y2K Internet performance watch include the following:

    Relative
   Time Zone    Location                      Web Site

      00:00     Tonga                         www.candw.to
     -01:00     Fiji                          www.fiji-online.com.fj
                New Zealand                   www.govt.nz
     -02:00     Khabarovsk, Russia            www.iks.ru
     -03:00     Sydney, Australia             www.sydney.com.au
     -03:30     Adelaide, Australia           www.adelaide.com.au
     -04:00     Brisbane, Australia           www.brisbaneonthenet.com
     -05:00     Japan                         www.matsushita.co.jp
                South Korea                   www.oracle.co.kr
     -06:00     Hong Kong                     www.china.com
                Taiwan                        www.sina.com.tw
                China                         www.peopledaily.com.cn
     -07:00     Thailand                      www.inet.co.th
     -08:00     Sri Lanka                     www.ccom.lk
                Novosibirsk, Russia           www.nsc.ru
     -08:30     India                         www.nic.in
     -09:00     Pakistan                      www.pak.gov.pk
     -10:00     Tbilisi, Georgia              www.sanet.ge
                Dubai, UAE                    www.emix.net
     -10:30     Iran                          www.iranet.net.ir
     -11:00     Moscow, Russia                www.msu.ru
                Kuwait                        www.kuwait.net
     -12:00     Kiev, Ukraine                 www.kiev.ua
                Israel                        www.netvision.net.il
                South Africa                  www.mweb.co.za
     -13:00     France                        www.francetelecom.fr
                Vatican                       www.vatican.va
     -14:00     United Kingdom                www.barclays.co.uk
     -15:00      Azores                       www.lajes.af.mil
     -16:00     Brazil                        www.embratel.net.br
     -17:00     Argentina                     www.telefonica.com.ar
                Chile                         home.netup.cl
     -17:30     Newfoundland, Canada          www.nfol.ca
     -18:00     Puerto Rico, U.S.A            www.coqui.net
                Bermuda                       www.bsx.com
     -19:00     Washington, D.C.              www.whitehouse.gov
                Colombia                      www.presidencia.gov.co
     -20:00     Mexico City                   www.prodigy.net.mx
     -21:00     Mazatlan, Mexico              www.mazatlan.com.mx
     -22:00     Silicon Valley, U.S.A.        www.cisco.com
     -23:00     Alaska, U.S.A.                www.state.ak.us
     -24:00     Hawaii, U.S.A.                www.visit.hawaii.org
-0-

Note to press: In addition to the Y2K Internet Performance results, Keynote is available as a resource to editors for immediate information on the performance and availability of any web site in the world, whether Millennium-related or otherwise. With Keynote's Instant Perspective(TM) service, we can instantly measure the performance and reliability of any web site in the world from any of our locations around the world to give you up-to-the-minute information for your stories and articles.

How Keynote Measured the Y2K Internet Performance

Keynote used its Perspective service to measure the performance and availability of a major web site in each of the 24 global time zones from the company's global network of measurement computers in over 90 locations around the world. This provided an immediate perspective on the effect of Y2K based on over 200,000 measurements each day during the global Millennium change. Measurements of the selected web sites began over a week ago to provide a benchmark comparison.

Keynote Perspective profiles the complete user experience of executing interactive multi-page transactions and downloading content, including graphics and banner ads, from World Wide Web sites to multiple locations around the world. The service supports industry-standard HTTP and secure HTTPS, the same protocols used by the Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) and Netscape (Nasdaq:AOL) web browsers. For the Keynote Y2K Internet Performance Hotline, Keynote is performing the measurements every 15 minutes around the clock from each of its automated measurement locations around the world which are connected to the Internet via T-1 communication lines.

How Keynote Measures Quality of Service For Its Customers

Keynote produces over 15 million discrete measurements of page downloads, transaction times and availability rates every day for more than 6,000 web sites whose quality of service Keynote measures for its customers. Performance results and availability rates for measured web sites, for a popular Site-of-the-Week and for the Keynote Business 40 Index are available on the Internet in real time to anyone with a web browser. Keynote Perspective also provides daily quality-of-service summary reports by email as well as an alarm service that notifies subscribers by pager or email of outages or deterioration in quality of service.

Keynote also offers a free one-week comparative web-site performance appraisal against the Site-of-the-Week and the Keynote Business 40 Index, with its Keynote Perspective service, to any company that develops or operates a business web site with a registered domain name and submits an application online at http://www.keynote.com/newsfpa.html.

The Keynote Business 40 Index is an industry-standard metric and benchmark of the overall health and performance of the Internet that is published weekly in The Industry Standard and other leading business and trade publications. The Index comprises 40 important web sites in six categories of publishing, search engines and directories, business services, financial services, high technology and communications. The Index provides historical and real-time performance measurements for the web sites of 3Com (Nasdaq:COMS), Charles Schwab (NYSE:SCH), CNET (Nasdaq:CNET), Excite@Home (Nasdaq:ATHM), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HWP), IBM (NYSE:IBM), InfoSeek/Go (NYSE:GO), Lycos (Nasdaq:LCOS), Merrill Lynch (NYSE:MER), Novell (Nasdaq:NOVL), Oracle (Nasdaq:ORCL), Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq:SUNW), Yahoo (Nasdaq:YHOO) and 27 other companies.

About Keynote

Keynote is the largest provider of Internet performance measurement, diagnostic and consulting services to companies that operate e-commerce web sites. The company markets Keynote Perspective(TM)and Keynote Lifeline(TM)global real-time services that measure, assure and improve the Quality of Service of e-commerce web sites around the world. The company captures over 15 million performance measurements daily using Keynote'global infrastructure of over 220 measurement computers connected to the major Internet backbones in over 90 statistically selected Internet access locations across 45 metropolitan areas worldwide. Internet performance and availability data are collected at Keynote's sophisticated operations center and are instantly available to customers through any web browser.

Keynote customers include over 500 leading e-commerce web sites and hosting companies including AdForce (Nasdaq:ADFC), Amazon.com (Nasdaq:AMZN), CDNow (Nasdaq:CDNW), Compaq Computer (NYSE:CPQ), Cisco Systems (Nasdaq:CSCO), Dell Computer (Nasdaq:DELL), Digex (Nasdaq:DIGX), DoubleClick (Nasdaq:DCLK), Exodus Communications (Nasdaq:EXDS), Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT), National Semiconductor (NYSE:NSM), and SABRE Holdings (NYSE:TSG).

For further information about Keynote, visit the Keynote web site at http://www.keynote.com or contact the company at Keynote Systems, Inc., 2855 Campus Drive, San Mateo, Calif. 94403, telephone [phone], fax [phone], email [e-mail].

Note To Editors: Keynote, Perspective, Lifeline, AccuStat, MyKeynote and The Internet Performance Authority are trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Note to Press: Press and analysts researching or writing on the effects of Y2K on the Internet over the Millennium turnover are invited to call Keynote's Millennium Internet Performance Hotline at 650/522-1234, and to contact Keynote for quantitative data and commentary.