UUNET TO DELIVER FASTER INTERNET SERVICES FOR BUSINESS IN YORKSHIRE AND THE NORTH EAST

UUNET, a global leader in Internet communications solutions, announced that it plans to increase its Internet capacity in Yorkshire and the North East from 32 Mega/bits per second (Mbps) to 318 Mbps. This is part of a £2 million investment by UUNET into the UK regions, to enable businesses in the area to transport more data across the Internet faster.

The improvements to the Leeds Internet data centre, which is housed close to the city centre, are to meet the rapidly growing needs of Yorkshire and the North East for higher capacity Internet access by providing faster connection to the UUNET international network backbone.

This means that Yorkshire and North Eastern businesses will be able 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.

UUNET's investment will provide Yorkshire and North Eastern businesses with the scope for expansion. Many enterprises start Internet business with a dial up connection but develop to use leased or fixed lines. These provide higher capacity, 24-hour a day services and suit typical corporate internal LANs (networks).

The Leeds data centre (known as a PoP - Point of Presence) will have the extra capacity or headroom to cope with the growing number of local businesses that will come online. This will help support the region's continuing growth as a major financial and legal centre, by allowing it to offer a more reliable exchange for transporting information and communications data to its existing business community and future investors alike.

The project is being carried out by the UK operating company of UUNET, formerly UUNET PIPEX.

Richard Heyes, UK managing director, UUNET, said: "Yorkshire and the North East is one of the largest centres for finance and the legal community outside of London. In particular, for the significant number of major players in 'direct' (telephone) operations who are favouring the area, such as First Direct.

"By bringing high capacity access to the Internet directly to the region, UUNET can accommodate the increasing online needs of businesses in Yorkshire and the North East - an essential requirement for growth in the 'direct' sector in particular."

Technical Details

UUNET is upgrading its Leeds PoP, by installing twin high bandwidth 155 (Mbps) and a single 8 Mbps data links to the rest of the UUNET network. This will enable it to offer Yorkshire and North East-based businesses dedicated leased line connections of up to 45 Mbps to the Internet.

This is part of the company's overall investment in its network worldwide. This includes a ten-fold increase over the past year in its US to UK capacity (from 45 Mbps to a total of 645 Mbps) and a seven-fold increase, over the past six months, in the size of its European network (from 400 Mbps to 3000 Mbps). During the same period, UUNET also increased its London to Europe capacity by over 350% (from 159 Mbps to 567 Mbps).

By implementing these increases, UUNET aims to develop the most reliable, widely deployed Internet network. In Europe, this network now provides direct connections to London from Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Monaco, Milan, Stockholm and Zurich. Further increases to the overall capacity are planned for the future.