Interoute Launches New Metropolitan Area Networks

April 5, 2002 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Interoute (interoute.com), a leading European telecommunications company, announced on Wednesday that it has launched metropolitan area networks (MANs) in seven European cities, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Paris and Vienna, with one more scheduled to come into service in June in Zurich.

Interoute says dark fibre is immediately available over the MANs and other services such as SDH and wavelengths are scheduled for the second quarter of 2002.

The company already has metro infrastructure in London, Amsterdam, Paris and Rome. The new metro rings, says Interoute, dramatically increase the company’s network reach, adding 52 new points of presence (PoPs) to the network, which now stretches over 600 route kilometers and 67 metro PoPs in 7 countries.

The metro PoPs, says Interoute, include carrier hotels, telehouses and CLEC PoPs, as well as 12 of the leading Internet exchanges in Europe. These locations offer customers connecitivity to the i-21 network, and its services, other networks, the Internet and to colocation facilities.

Interoute says its MANs facilitate the delivery of services such as virtual private networks, from end to end. The company says it is partnering with selected local access carriers to provide last mile connections for customers located off-net.

"The metropolitan area is a major bottleneck for some competitors, but not for us,” says Alan Lowe, CEO of Interoute’s FutureCom division. “We are aggressively pursuing our MAN strategy and have plans to build metro rings in seven more cities in Europe by the end of 2002. We can now offer our customers a seamless, fully managed, end-to-end service, using our MANs to get close to customers. At the same time, customers requiring metro connectivity within one or more cities can do so without taking services on the i-21 backbone network. The MANs allow us to serve local, national and international markets with our range of managed network services."