euNetworks launches Europe's highest-capacity fiber network, unveils pan-European "private fiber network" business model

July 24, 2006 Frankfurt, Germany -- euNetworks, the European division of Global Voice Group, today unveiled Europe's highest-capacity fiber-optic network that combines long-haul (country-to-country/city-to-city) with last-mile (inner-city) fiber, connecting Europe's largest cities and economies.

The massive fiber capacity enables euNetworks to offer what it claims is a unique pricing and business model--"private fiber networks"--delivering dedicated, secure, un-metered fiber strands to customers and providing virtually unlimited bandwidth at a flat rate. To complement its metropolitan fiber networks, euNetworks today also announced the successful acquisition of Viatel Holding's long-haul network and the completion of € 35 million in funding through a convertible bond.

"The long-haul fiber network acquisition completes our infrastructure roll out in Europe by connecting all of our metropolitan fiber networks," contends Noel Meaney, chief executive officer, euNetworks. "We are now uniquely positioned to offer our corporate, carrier, and service-provider clients secure and highly efficient end-to-end connectivity in Europe. Customers enabled with their own private fiber solution from euNetworks benefit from a communications infrastructure with virtually limitless capacity for a fixed cost that is completely secure with 100 percent mission-critical fail-over reliability," he explains. "This enables our clients to rollout high-capacity broadband services and bandwidth-intensive applications efficiently and securely with built-in network redundancy."

Constructed at a cost of nearly € 2 billion, euNetworks says it acquired its infrastructure from companies in financial distress (post-dot.com collapse) at a fraction of the actual construction cost. This means that euNetworks can offer its customers all of the benefits of its next-generation € 2-billion network without passing on the € 2 billion in costs. With only about 2% current network utilization, euNetworks has massive capacity to deploy its private fiber networks--meaning dedicated fiber strands, unlike the industry-standard model of shared and metered circuits for lease or purchase.

euNetworks' network links long-haul (country-to-country/city-to-city) fiber between five key geographies--Germany, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium. The network also has 15 last-mile or inner-city fiber connections in Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne, Dublin, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, The Hague, Hamburg, Hanover, London, Munich, Paris, Rotterdam, Stuttgart, and Utrecht.

The network capacity is approximately 6.4 million km, enough to circle the earth 160 times. Each individual fiber pair is capable of transmitting approximately 3,200 IPTV streams; 5.2 million voice calls; or 330 million simultaneous banking transactions. euNetworks' metropolitan fiber infrastructure contains an average of six ducts per city with 432 strands of fiber in each duct. The network is designed redundantly in a dense, mesh configuration to provide 100% fail-over, mission-critical reliability, say euNetworks representatives.

euNetworks' clients are large-scale corporations, carriers, and service providers with high-bandwidth and advanced communication needs. To service their individual demands, euNetworks professional services team designs and deploys networking solutions such as Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, WDM, SDH, and IPVPNs (Internet-Protocol virtual private networks). Each client solution is designed with 100% fail-over redundancy and monitored 24X7 from a Frankfurt-based network operating center (NOC).

Completing the offering are a range of managed services, including hosting (co-location applications), storage (offsite storage and data replication), and security (firewalls, intrusion prevention), all of which are provisioned from 15,000 square meters of data-center space in Amsterdam, Dublin, and Frankfurt.

The launchIwas made possible due to the successful acquisition of 50% of Viatel Holding Limited's pan-European fiber network. This includesI5,424 km of long-haul fiber connecting 18 cities, a metropolitan network in Paris, and two undersea cables linking continental Europe and the UnitedIKingdom. EuNetworks raised € 35 million through a convertible bond to fund this acquisition and to support its investment in business development.

More information on euNetworks can be found on its new web site, also launched today, at www.eunetworks.com.