INDUSTRY

PITTSBURGH, PA -- The Quilt, a coalition of leading regional research and education networking organizations across the United States, today announced that Level 3 Communications and Qwest Communications have been selected as authorized national providers of Internet services for its Participants. The Quilt is a coalition of 17 regional networking organizations dedicated to providing advanced networking services to the research and education communities. Level 3 and Qwest were selected from a dozen proposals based on their ability to collaboratively and strategically provide high-performance nationwide network services to some of the nation's most sophisticated regional, metropolitan, and campus networks. Collectively, participants in The Quilt currently use over 4.5 gigabits per second of commodity Internet capacity today, and expect this use to reach over 8 gigabits per second by the end of next year. "We are extremely pleased to be working with Level 3 and Qwest to meet the collective technical requirements and cumulative capacity needs of participants in The Quilt," said Gwendolyn Huntoon, executive director of The Quilt. "We expect this collaboration to continue the well-defined track record of success for partnerships between companies and the leading-edge Internet community The Quilt represents." "Level 3 is committed to helping The Quilt further extend the deployment of advanced networking for the research and education communities it serves," said Jack Waters, CTO for Level 3. "Collaborating with research and education organizations like The Quilt is a key focus at Level 3. We believe that our network provides the unique performance capabilities and scalable interconnection capacity to other IP backbones necessary to help The Quilt reach its goals." "Qwest is pleased that its broadband network will contribute to the future of cutting-edge research and communication," said Cliff Holtz, executive vice president, Qwest Business Markets. "By expanding available Internet-access options, this new program broadens the resources available to the always-vital research community, an important customer group for Qwest." Membership in The Quilt includes the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), EDUCAUSE, the Front Range Gigapop (FRGP), the Great Plains Network (GPN), the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), Merit Networks, the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN), Net.Work.Virginia, the North Carolina GigaPoP, Northern Lights, the Northern Crossroads (NoX), NYSERNet, the Oregon GigaPoP, OARnet, the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), the Pittsburgh GigaPoP, the Southern Crossroads (SoX), Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) and the Texas GigaPoP. The selection closed the first round of The Quilt's Commodity Internet Services Project. Progress is already underway for a second round of the project. For more information, see: http://www.thequilt.net/proj-cis/