LONDON -- COLT has today announced that the Southern European leg of the COLT inter-city communications network is now operational. This fully owned and managed network of over 2,500 route kilometres connects the well established COLT City networks in Switzerland, Southern France and Northern Italy with most of the other major cities in Europe via the existing COLT EuroLAN high quality network of 6,600 route kilometres.n The new routes link the major Italian cities of Milan and Turin with Marseilles in France before heading north to Lyon and then eastwards to connect with Geneva and Zurich. COLT has been providing city-wide networks in the business districts of these cities for several years. This new build enables these important locations to be connected to the other 21 cities on the COLT network and to benefit from high capacity, long distance services via the fully COLT owned SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) infrastructure. Peter Manning, President and CEO of COLT Telecom Group said: "The completion of this, the latest phase of the COLT EuroLAN, means that we can now provide even more of our customers with an expanded range of high bandwidth services of the highest possible quality. The end-to-end ownership and operating control we have over our network is a key enabler in the provision of first class customer service.t provides significant competitive advantage." Colt Telecom Group PLC