Cable and Wireless

Cable and Wireless America is one of the leading providers of complex hosting and IP solutions for global enterprises, counting 40% of the Fortune 100 among its customers. The company's portfolio of services includes a wide range of flexible and secure IP connectivity and networking solutions along with complete and secure infrastructure to support complex web hosting. Cable and Wireless America is part of the Cable and Wireless group, whose principal operations are in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, the United States, Japan, the Caribbean, Panama, the Middle East and Macau.

Awards and recognition: Cable and Wireless America is proud to have been acknowledged by many U.S. organizations over the past year. These awards from some of the most authoritative voices in the industry confirm our status as the single source for comprehensive web hosting and IP services that provide enterprise businesses with solutions of guaranteed quality.

Cable and Wireless is a leading international telecommunications company, with customers in 80 countries. For 130 years it has constantly reinvented itself to embrace the latest technological advances to serve its customers' needs.

More and more of the world's leading enterprises depend on Cable and Wireless to unite their business information and communications, through solutions of guaranteed quality. They work with their customers to answer key business needs, designing solutions that combine the expertise of their people, their financial strength and the outstanding reliability and performance of their global infrastructure.

Cable and Wireless provides IP (Internet Protocol), voice and data services to business customers, and to residential customers in some markets, as well as services to other telecoms carriers, mobile operators and providers of content, applications and internet services.

In 2003 Cable and Wireless integrated its global and regional divisions to create a group of national telecoms companies with strong positions in their primary markets. These companies are closely bound by a common strategy; shared marketing, technical and regulatory skills; and established relationships both with each other and with national operators across the world.

'Picture-perfect' availability and unbeatable performance earned Cable and Wireless America the top spot in a rigorous independent test of internet backbones conducted by Network World magazine in 2002. The month-long survey found that the Cable and Wireless America network was available 100% of the time, performing to a consistently high standard without dropping a single packet.

Cable and Wireless America outperformed six competitors in the survey, including Level 3, Qwest and Sprint.

Picture-perfect availability: The industry-accepted gold standard for uptime is 99.999%, amounting to just five minutes of downtime per year. Cable and Wireless America went even further, recording 100% uptime, even during planned and emergency maintenance periods.

Cable and Wireless America recorded an average jitter of 44 microseconds - well below the level that would disrupt any application - and the lowest maximum jitter of all participating companies. It also set the standard for all internet service providers on packet loss with a perfect score for the test period. It didn't drop a single packet, even during maintenance periods.

What the test measured: The Network World test was one of the most demanding ever conducted on internet backbone performance. The organizers placed four measuring devices at different U.S. locations on each participating network, collecting data on performance throughout August 2002. In all, the survey collected 156 million measurements on three areas of performance:

Uptime - the amount of time a network is 'available', or transmitting information. This is the most important measure of any network because good performance in other areas is meaningless if the network is down.

Jitter - the variation in arrival times of consecutive packets. A high jitter rate is indicative of inconsistent performance and can have a damaging effect on applications, particularly real-time applications like voice and video that require consistency and reliability.

Packet loss - the number of packets of data a network fails to deliver. High packet loss can cause serious problems for applications and will slow a network down. For more information on packet loss and its impact on network performance, see the website: http://www.cwusa.com