Cisco Systems Inc. of San Jose, CA, and Qwest Communications Corp. of Denver, CO, have formed an alliance to build broadband business multimedia services. Together, the companies will build an Internet protocol network capable of delivering telephony, fax, videoconferencing, whiteboarding, multicasting, and other multimedia applications. Initial collaboration will include voice gateways, provisioning, and interfaces to applications such as customer care, billing, and status monitoring. Qwest also plans to deploy Cisco`s 12000 Series of Gigabit Switch Routers at the OC-12 (622-Mbit/sec) rate into its OC-192 (10-Gbit/sec) Synchronous Optical Network. Deployment has started between Los Angeles, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Denver.