PITTSBURGH -- TelCove, a leading provider of business critical telecommunications services to enterprise customers and carriers, today announced significant growth in a core metric for competitive service providers -- buildings on net. Buildings on net are buildings directly connected by fiber to a service provider's metro network. In 2005, TelCove's number of buildings on net grew 20% to 3,817 buildings, making TelCove among the fastest growing competitive providers based on this key metric.

Customers in TelCove on-net buildings gain powerful competitive advantages through their on-net telecommunications services. On-net customers receive premium high-bandwidth network transport for their "real-time" and "mission- critical" networked applications. Examples are healthcare facilities and hospitals requiring regulatory compliant, secure delivery of medical records or the transport of high bandwidth x-rays and digital images. Transaction- oriented companies such as banks, financial institutions, retail establishments, and e-commerce sites have similar business-critical network requirements.

These on-net enterprises need a network provider offering the highest levels of security to protect customer data; the highest levels of availability to complete transactions and ensure their network applications are always running; the highest levels of scalability so incremental growth is quick and easy; and the highest quality network operations and management to guarantee continuous support and application up-time. These on-net customers also require that their provider have complete, end-to-end control over the service delivery -- delivering the service directly to the customer premises. This eliminates a potential and significant point of failure that can occur when a provider relies on another carrier for the "last mile" or final connection to their premises.

On-net enterprises directly connected by fiber to TelCove's metro network receive all of these benefits and advantages.

Unique benefits that TelCove's on-net customers also receive include access in all TelCove markets to very high-speed Ethernet transport, enhanced connectivity for next generation packet based services such as IP Virtual Private Networks and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and support for complex managed services and applications such as remote storage, disaster recovery, and business continuity.

Mike Cretaro, IT Director for Hematology-Oncology Associates of Central New York, states, "Hematology-Oncology Associates is committed to providing the highest level of care to patients with blood disorders and cancer. Our state-of-the-art, comprehensive cancer center is connected to two satellite offices and offers full service medical and radiation oncology treatments, including diagnostic testing. In 2005, we directly connected our facilities using TelCove's 10 Megabit Ethernet services. Technology in medicine is increasing rapidly. At the same time, the business of healthcare -- with HIPAA and other requirements -- is becoming more complex. We looked at some shared Internet services for our office connectivity needs, but went with TelCove's dedicated on-net Ethernet services based on their very reliable, high- availability SONET based services and their local and creative sales and technical support teams."

TelCove Inc.