Tiscali International Network Offers International Reach to Regional Service Providers using Ethernet Extension

TINet’s New Wholesale Service Offering Helps Regional ISPs take on Global Carriers

Milan, 1st December 2008: Tiscali International Network (TINet), the world’s only carrier exclusively dedicated to the wholesale IP-MPLS market, has today announced that it is launching its Ethernet Extension product, to offer international connectivity to regional providers, Value added Resellers (VARs) and System Integrators (SIs) serving the corporate market. Ethernet Extension service will offer TINet customers with last mile connectivity into all major international destinations. This will also allow a number of regional providers to finally have an edge over their larger global competitors.

TINet Ethernet Extension is highly scalable and delivers end-to-end connectivity right down to the end user buildings. The service allows Regional service providers, as well as VARs and/or SIs, to offer scalable and cost effective services such as Virtual Private Network (VPN) services, to their corporate customers. The service supports overlay of QoS and other frequently used protocols hence is extremely flexible to meet specific corporate customer needs.

In implementing Ethernet Extension, customers are able to take advantage of TINet’s Ethernet Private lines for point to point connectivity and VPLS service for multipoint connectivity. The network coverage achieved provides high connectivity to customers due to the strong relationships that TINet has built and leveraged with providers worldwide, particularly in the European, USA and Asian markets.

As part of TINet’s IP-Flow service suite, Ethernet Extension is delivered through TINet’s global IP-MPLS backbone as well as TINet’s extended network reach achieved through partnerships agreements with national access providers and regional carriers. In partnering with TINet, the service providers can ensure to their customers guaranteed bandwidth as Ethernet frames are transported between the customer’s sites over TINet’s backbone.

Paolo Gambini, Sales and Marketing Director at TINet explains, “We are increasingly finding that Ethernet is the most dominant technology in today’s last mile access needs and most service providers will recognise Ethernet as being the standard to use. As a technology that our customers place so much importance on, we wanted to offer a product that could help them make their Ethernet offerings competitive amongst their global competitors.

We are extremely excited therefore to be able to offer Ethernet Extension as a new product that not only expands our global network footprint, but also provides a level playing field to the regional providers that we work with such that they can truly compete with the big carriers”.

Ethernet Extension makes up one element of TINet’s IP/MPLS service capabilities in their IP-Flow service suite, other products include ‘Global IP Transit’ to provide top quality connection to the global Internet routing table for IPv4 and IPv6, ‘Virtual Leased Line’ that replaces traditional leased lines with the transparent transport of data protocols over MPLS, and ‘Remote Peering’ that allows customers to connect to remote peering points without having to deploy infrastructure at the peering points.

About Tiscali International Network (TINet)

Tiscali International Network (TINet) – the carrier arm of Tiscali Group – is a pure play carrier business delivering International Wholesale Products to Carriers and Service Providers worldwide. As a specialist player exclusively focusing on wholesale customers, TINet has engineered its network and its organisation to deliver the best service experience to its Service Providers customer base.

TINet IP/MPLS backbone counts over 100 IP-MPLS PoPs and extends over 16 European countries and across the United States, Canada, as well as Singapore and Hong Kong.

Its Autonomous Systems (AS3257) in only 5 years has grown up to become a core ASN in the global Internet routing table as well as one of the top 10 global IPv4 backbones and the top IPv6 backbone worldwide. TINet has been one of the very first companies worldwide to have a “next generation Internet” multi-service network in actual production that implements a full suite of service-enabling protocols such as MPLS, CoS, IPv6 and Multicasting.

For more information on TINet, please visit www.tiscali.net

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For further information please contact:

Maria Grazia Angei for TINet

Tel: +39 02 30 9011

mgrazia.angei {at} tiscali(.)net

Sonus PR for TINet

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7851 4821

martin.smith {at} sonuspr(.)com