TORONTO -- Shared Technologies of Canada (STOC), a Cogent Communications Group company (AMEX: COI), announced today that it is launching an On-Net 500 Kilobit per second (Kbps) service in Canada called Fiber 500©. This new product will compete directly with DSL offerings on price, but it will also provide a superior level of performance that cannot be matched by ordinary copper line-based services. Cogent’s all-optical, facilities-based network enables Cogent to provide each customer a dedicated, non-oversubscribed Internet connection with a 99.99% reliability guarantee.Cogent is offering Fiber 500 in 21 markets across the United States and Toronto in the same buildings in which it provides its trademark service of 100 Mbps for $1,000 per month. Fiber 500 is designed to attract approximately 40% of an office building’s tenants that currently use DSL and would not typically consider a jump to 100 Mbps at $1,000 per month. Pricing Fiber 500 at $349 CA per month will provide DSL customers with a cutting edge, higher performance network at a price they can afford.Today, DSL customers receive actual throughput based on their distance from their provider’s central office. This means that a DSL customer pays for an advertised level of service but only receives a fraction of the bandwidth promised. Cogent, on the other hand, provides dedicated bandwidth so customers enjoy the exact throughput they pay for 24 hours per day, every day of the year. Cogent’s Fiber 500 product is superior to DSL due to the use of fiber connectivity, full service level agreement (SLA) and 17 day guaranteed installation time.“We want to be equally attractive to every tenant in a Cogent designated building regardless of their bandwidth needs. It’s tough to ask someone paying $400 per month for DSL bandwidth to jump to $1,000 per month for 100 Mbps, no matter how great of a deal that really is. Our Fiber 500 product is designed to provide a superior product to the DSL marketplace,” said Dave Schaeffer, CEO Cogent Communications. “Fiber 500 provides a protected, dedicated half megabit connection at a price point that will complement Cogent’s 100 Mbps offering, not compete with it.“Cogent Communications Group Inc.