CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- US LEC Corp. (NASDAQ:CLEC), a full-service provider of IP, data and voice solutions to businesses and enterprise organizations throughout the Eastern United States, today announced the expansion of its MPLS VPN data network that can now provide scalable and secure connectivity both nationally and internationally.

"US LEC is expanding our MPLS VPN service in response to substantial customer demand, allowing us to better serve multi-location customers on a national level while also providing international connectivity," said Jeffrey Blackey, US LEC senior vice president of marketing and business development. "We now have the ability to provide flexible, secure communications options to customers' headquarters, branch offices and facilities outside of our previously established 16-state footprint." US LEC MPLS VPN service provides a robust solution for businesses that allows data traffic with differing requirements to co-exist on the same network, such as Internet access, enterprise-wide inter-office VoIP calling and critical business applications such as Customer Resource Management applications.

MPLS VPN offers a considerable improvement to legacy data networking solutions through its meshed network architecture. Previous data networking solutions offered a "hub and spoke" network design that made the "hub" a single point of failure for all applications. MPLS VPN is built on a "meshed" architecture and eliminates the requirement for a central host that can become a bottleneck. Speeds may also be scaled incrementally from fractional T-1 speeds below 1.544 Megabits per second (Mbs) to DS3 (up to 45 Mbs) to Ethernet Local Loop at 100 Mbs.MPLS VPN supports quality of service (QoS) guarantees, allowing US LEC customers to prioritize traffic. With traffic prioritization, the most important traffic travels over available bandwidth first with other traffic utilizing remaining bandwidth. As priority traffic decreases, all other traffic uses available bandwidth. Better bandwidth utilization helps businesses reduce the amount of bandwidth needed, reducing costs and improving a business' ability to utilize its bandwidth investment effectively.

"An MPLS solution provides US LEC customers the survivability for business continuity and a data networking service that can grow incrementally as the business grows," said Alan Fitzpatrick, US LEC senior vice president of engineering. "This expansion now gives an even broader avenue for growth, including branch offices both located outside our U.S. markets and internationally."

US LEC Corp. (Nasdaq: CLEC)