SAN ANTONIO -- SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE:SBC) today announced its SBC local service companies have enhanced the features and widened availability of its Multi-Service Optical Networking (MON) solutions to provide businesses with an efficient and scalable way to connect mainframes, data centers and storage networks within a metropolitan area. SBC MON solutions are now available to enterprises that need to connect multiple locations within a city using optical ring configurations. SBC MON enables customers to interconnect client data centers and business sites in a highly reliable, secure metropolitan area network. The services use dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) to enable protocol-independent optical connectivity with bandwidth of up to 160 Gbps per fiber pair. DWDM makes it possible for many data streams to travel over the same pair of fiber by utilizing different colors of the light spectrum. The enhanced SBC MON services allow businesses to connect multiple locations in a metro area using a ring network configuration. This ring architecture provides the highest available levels of reliability and redundancy, making it ideal for high-speed transmission of any business-critical information, as well as disaster recovery and business continuity applications and mirroring data. "Businesses do not want to spend time and money worrying about connecting and translating multiple protocols running on multiple networks," said Mark Fishler, vice president, SBC data networking. "With advanced DWDM technology at the core of our fully managed SBC MON solutions, such compatibility and management concerns are eliminated, allowing our customers to focus on their businesses rather than their networks." SBC Communications Inc.