BEIJING –- Three of China's leading state commercial banks – Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), China Construction Bank (CCB) and the Bank of China (BOC) – have selected advanced optical and data solutions from Nortel [NYSE/TSX :NT] to help improve the security and reliability of their networks and to enhance their business continuity capabilities.

"Nortel was chosen for its leadership and broad experience in meeting the critical communications challenges of the financial services industry globally as well as in China," said Stephen Tsui, president, Enterprise Networks, Greater China, Nortel. "Our solutions specifically designed for financial institutions provide maximum protection for the most critical applications while significantly enhancing services for banking customers."

Under agreements announced today, Nortel will deploy banking-focused solutions to provide local (LAN) and wide area (WAN) networking and metro dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) for ABC's headquarters and Ningxia, Shanghai and Sichuan Branches; CCB's Beijing Branch; and the Jilin Branch of BOC. These solutions will position the three banks to add speed and performance to their networks, and to provide backup and redundancy to ensure uninterrupted access to information.

ABC's headquarters and CCB's Beijing Branch will deploy Nortel's Optical Metro 5200 metro DWDM platform to interconnect multiple data centers. This solution offers an optimized storage and transport architecture with 99.999 percent reliability. It will allow the two institutions to back up critical data in real time, maximize the efficiency of server resources, and provide fast access to the data for recovery. In addition, Nortel will supply its Web Switch 184 (formerly known as Alteon Web Switch 184) to ABC's headquarters to implement firewall load balancing and maximize network security.

To accommodate growing transaction volume and the need for higher-quality communications, ABC's Sichuan branch will expand its WAN with Nortel's Multiservice Switch 7480 (formerly known as Passport 7480) to connect more than 100 sub branches across the province.

ABC's Ningxia Branch and BOC's Jilin Branch will each upgrade their provincial LANs with Nortel solutions to support hundreds of thousands of financial transactions on a daily basis with enhanced speed and reliability. Similarly, the Shanghai Branch of ABC will deploy a LAN upgrade to improve inter-office employee communications and collaboration through services like e-mail, file transfer protocol services, and high-speed Internet access. Nortel will also supply its Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 and 5510 (formerly known as Passport 8600 and BayStack 5510) and Business Policy Switch to these branches.

Chinese banks have steadily increased technology spending in the past five years to enhance core capabilities and expand service portfolios to cope with intensifying competition resulting from industry-wide deregulation and China's commitments to the World Trade Organization (WTO). According to a CCW Research Report, technology spending by Chinese banks is expected to exceed US$2 billion in 2004.

Nortel Networks Ltd.