GTE introduces the industry's most rigorous, comprehensive service level guarantee for dedicated Internet access

IRVING, Texas - Continuing its long history of offering aggressive service level guarantees, GTE Internetworking, a division of GTE Corp., today released the industry's most rigorous guarantees for business Internet connectivity.

These guarantees, available to both U.S. and international customers, provide businesses with credits for service in the event they experience transmission delays, information loss, or degradation in the network availability. Unlike some Internet service providers that credit customers based on the monthly average downtime, including weekends and non-business hours, GTE's guarantees are based on outages and delays during business hours - making these guarantees more meaningful to customers' businesses.

Specifically, the new service level guarantees contain stringent performance measures for latency - the time it takes for data to travel to its destination - and packet loss - the amount of information that does not reach its destination. Effective immediately, GTE's dedicated Internet access customers in the United States and abroad will receive one full day of credit in the event of a network outage, based on the following parameter:

Domestic Service Level Guarantee

International Service Level Guarantee

"GTE Internetworking is committed to providing trouble-free Internet connectivity worldwide. Our philosophy is never to oversubscribe or under build our network capacity," said Richard Kane, service line director for GTE Internetworking's Managed Connectivity Service. "Because our network is engineered to be more than 99.9% reliable, we can guarantee our customers a seamless Internet communication all the time. Our 10 minute real-time impact guarantee is evaluated and examined during business hours when Internet communication matters most to our customers."

The guarantee covers areas over which GTE Internetworking has control, including all equipment, wiring and telephone circuits within and between GTE Internetworking's Points of Presence (POPs). It does not include customer premise equipment (CPE), telephone circuits between customer locations and GTE Internetworking POPs, and non-GTE Internetworking equipment or network connections. Network performance is managed and monitored through GTE Internetworking's Network Operation Centers (NOC).

The GTE NOC has its primary location in Cambridge, Mass., and is fully supported by a redundant NOC located in Columbia, Md. The NOC provides end-to-end network monitoring and fault isolation, proactively seeks problem resolution and provides 24-hour-a-day trouble ticket and status reporting.

About GTE Internetworking

GTE Internetworking, a unit of GTE Corporation (NYSE:GTE) offers customers, from consumers to Fortune 500 companies, a full spectrum of integrated Internet services using IP networking technologies. GTE Internetworking delivers complete network solutions, including dial-up and dedicated Internet access, high-performance Web hosting, virtual private networks (VPNs) managed Internet security, network management, systems integration, and Web-based application development for integrating the Internet into business operations. GTE Internetworking draws upon its expertise in funded research and development of advanced technologies, including satellite networks, packet radio networks, multi-gigabit routers, network and information security, and speech recognition, and GTE's strong existing telecommunications services, including local and long distance, wireless, paging, video, and Internet. GTE is one the world's largest telecommunications companies and a leading provider of integrated voice, video and data services. More information about GTE Internetworking and GTE Corp. can be found on the Internet at http://www.gte.com.

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