Posted: 09/2000

News Briefs

Broadwing Communications, a subsidiary of Broadwing Inc. (www.broadwing.com), is the first communications carrier to provide its carrier customers 10gbps optical wavelength services. Broadwing’s 17,000-mile fiber network is made up of optical DWDM bandwidth, unlike other networks that commonly rely on a combination of four OC-48s and cannot produce a pure 10gbps wavelength. The fiber optics deployed in Broadwing’s network utilize non-zero
dispersion-shifted fiber that will support all current and foreseen technologies.

* Level 3 Communications Inc.
(www.level3.com) announced it will receive more than $100 million in a dark fiber agreement with CoreExpress Inc.
(www.coreexpress.com), a provider of extranet services. Under the terms of the 20-year agreement, Level 3, a broadband infrastructure company, will sell CoreExpress 23,000 miles of fiber in its network backbone. CoreExpress will “light”
the fiber to build its Internet Data Exchange System (iDES), the first multi-ISP extranet platform.

* Verizon Corp. (www.verizon.com), the telecommunications company formed by the merger of Bell Atlantic
(www.bellatlantic.com) and GTE Corp. (www.gte.com), will create a center in Chesapeake, Va., to serve the company’s growing number of wholesale customers. The center, which was scheduled to open Aug. 8, will add 300 new jobs to Verizon’s existing workforce of 2,400 in the Hampton Roads, Va., area. The center will process requests for new digital loop service from those phone companies that buy Verizon’s network components on a wholesale basis and then use those components in the provisioning of their service. More than 100 carriers have been certified by the State Corporation Commission
(www.state.va.us.scc) to provide local phone service in Virginia.

* Coyote Network Systems Inc.
(www.cyoe.com) a next-generation service provider, has signed a letter of intent to acquire Group Long Distance, Inc. (www.gldnet.com), a non-facilities-based reseller of long-distance services to more than 15,000 small and medium-sized businesses and residential customers.

GLDI also has competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) licenses in more than 40 states.

Upon completion of the merger, GLDI’s operations would be merged into Coyote’s international long distance subsidiary, INET Interactive Network System, Inc.
(www.inettel.com). INET is a facilities-based telecommunications service provider that markets international and domestic long distance, primarily to affinity groups. It has approximately 20,000 small business and residential customers.