UUNET EXPANDS MANCHESTER-TO-BIRMINGHAM INTERNET CAPACITY ALMOST 20-FOLD.

UUNET, a MCI WorldCom company and a global leader in Internet communications, has announced the upgrading of its Internet link between Birmingham and Manchester from 8 Mbps to 155 Mbps. This provides significantly more capacity for faster, more reliable and resilient transfer of business data between both conurbations and onto London and the rest of the high bandwidth global Internet infrastructure provided by UUNET. This upgraded link follows the recent announcement of enhanced Internet infrastructure within both cities, as well developments in the rest of the UK and Europe. Last month, UUNET announced additional capacity at its Birmingham Internet data centre or Point of Presence (PoP), while last July it announced a similar upgrading of its Manchester PoP in association with local Internet services company, Telecity.

These developments, plus the new expanded bandwidth between the two cities, are designed to enable businesses in the Midlands and the North West to make greater use of the Internet to streamline working practices.

Enterprises already benefit from improved communication and information sharing via email, file transfers and interactive World-Wide Web sites. Increasingly, more commercial transactions and other activities are taking place over the Internet. Future developments will include fax, voice services and conferencing over the Internet. All of these depend on high capacity network access.