MCLEAN, Va. -- Global Internetworking, Inc. (GII), a facilities-neutral telecom carrier and network solutions provider, today announced that Airbus North America, the U.S. wholly-owned subsidiary of the world's largest maker of commercial airplanes, selected Global Internetworking to design, deploy and manage a high-capacity Wide Area Network (WAN) fiber ring linking Airbus' North America headquarters and operations in the Washington, D.C., area with the company's nationwide and global high-capacity data transport network.

"We have used Global Internetworking for the past two years. We have been very pleased with their networking expertise, service and focus on our requirements," said Charles Fletcher, Vice President of Information Services, Airbus North America. "The new managed network and fiber ring solution that GII is providing will help improve the performance and resilience of our network's ability to support mission critical business applications," said Fletcher.

The agreement with Airbus also marks the launch of Global Internetworking's new Managed Network Services offering. Global's Managed Network Service solution addresses the need of enterprises for highly reliable, cost-effective and turnkey Wide Area Network solutions that support advanced data networking, MPLS, Ethernet and Voice Over IP applications. "We believe that many enterprise customers want reliable networking solutions that are built around their specific business applications rather than the constraints of any one vendor's technology," said Todd Vecchio, GII's President and co-founder.

The Airbus 2.488 gigabit per second (Gbps) OC 48 self-healing fiber ring will run Ethernet-over-SONET and provide Gigabit Ethernet service for Airbus' data transport requirements for bandwidth-intensive applications for engineering and operations. The fiber ring will connect the headquarters for Airbus North America and Airbus North America Customer Services, which are located in Herndon, Virginia, with an office in nearby Washington, D.C.; and with the Airbus spares center located in Ashburn, Virginia, which serves customers in the U.S., Canada and much of Latin America and works in concert with Airbus spares facilities in Hamburg and Beijing.

High-capacity point-to-point circuits -- currently provisioned by Global Internetworking linking Airbus North America operations in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area to Airbus facilities in Wichita, Kansas, and Miami, Florida -- will interconnect with the new fiber ring.

The Wichita, Kansas, facility is the location of Airbus North America Engineering, which hosts some 180 engineers working on the A380, the newest and largest Airbus aircraft, plus other long-range programs. Miami is the location of the Airbus $50 million, 100,000-square-foot training center, which trains more than 4,000 aircrew mostly from North and Latin America, each year.

The Airbus North America fiber ring will also interconnect directly Airbus global headquarters in Toulouse, France, and with Airbus procurement, engineering, manufacturing and training operations in Toulouse; Filton, England; and Hamburg, Germany. Under the agreement with Airbus, GI is providing a managed network solution in which it will design and deploy the fiber ring, buy dark fiber, light the fiber with the appropriate equipment and run, monitor and manage operation of the OC 48 fiber ring.

The agreement with Airbus marks the launch of Global Internetworking's new Managed Network Services offering of custom network solutions. The new service includes, but is not limited to, WAN design; procurement, installation, build-out, testing; WAN site-to-site connectivity via various transport modes such as SONET ring, IP, Ethernet, MPLS, ATM and IP-VPN. It also includes collocation services, vendor/carrier management, network monitoring, network management and network maintenance.

Global Internetworking Inc.