NCSA AND KURCHATOV INSTITUTE SELECT TELEGLOBE TO PROVIDE FASTNET HIGH PERFORMANCE NETWORK LINKING U.S. AND RUSSIA

National Science Foundation and Russian Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology Fund New High Speed Network For Scientific Collaboration

RESTON, Va. and MOSCOW, Russia, December 14, 2001 – NCSA and the Kurchatov Institute, top research institutions in the U.S. and Russia respectively, today announced they have selected Teleglobe (NYSE, TSE: BCE), the e-World Communications Company, to develop a 155 megabit per second (Mbps) secure data connection that will give the two countries’ scientific communities unprecedented access to each other and facilitate joint scientific and educational projects.

The link, called NaukaNet (For Advanced Science and Technology Network), is funded in part by a $2 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Russian support for the link is from the Russian Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology. NaukaNet supports a strong alliance between NCSA, the Russian Research Center “Kurchatov Institute” in Moscow, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Moscow-based Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Teleglobe.

The new NaukaNet network will increase the bandwidth between the U.S. and Russia by orders of magnitude. NaukaNet will facilitate communications through high quality video-conferencing that has never been possible on such a wide basis between the U.S. and Russian scientific communities. The network’s capabilities will be put to use during the U.S.-Russian Science and Technology Dialog -- a series of science and technology working groups in nine different scientific disciplines, scheduled to begin next month. Following these dialogs, the discussions will expand to a broader range of topics and disciplines.

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