ATLANTA -- BellSouth today announced significant enhancements to its industry-leading Ethernet transport services for business customers. The BellSouth® Metro Ethernet Service portfolio provides cost effective data networking options for businesses, a critical component of the comprehensive voice and data communications that companies depend on for efficient operation.

In addition to traditional data networking, the enhanced platform for businesses offers new solutions for business continuity, data and storage center connectivity, sharing of medical and technical imaging, video and voice over IP (VoIP). The Metro Ethernet Service enhancements, known as Premium Service options, are initially available in Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, Jacksonville and Raleigh, with deployments to take place in additional metro areas throughout 2004.

With BellSouth's Premium Service, customers have several available options including committed bandwidth speeds, bursting capabilities above the committed speeds, traffic prioritization and VLAN aggregation along with Service Level Agreements and Customer Network Management services. All of these features were designed with the demands of new applications in mind. BellSouth anticipated the need to support low latency applications such as voice over IP and has designed a robust service offering to complement the existing best effort and dedicated Metro Ethernet products.

"BellSouth has offered innovative Metro Ethernet services for ten years and continues to deliver cost effective, high bandwidth transport services to customers using this technology," said Mark Kaish, BellSouth's vice president of Next Generation Services. "The Premium Service enhancements hit the sweet spot in a market where more businesses are migrating toward a converged voice and data environment and supporting more interactive applications and mission critical information across wide area networks. "

BellSouth Corp.