Viatel Names Bechtel Construction Project Manager For Ring Three Of The Circe Pan-european Network

Bechtel Telecommunications has already completed construction of Circe Ring One and was recently named construction manager for Ring Two. Ring One is an 1,850-kilometer loop that links London, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Paris, and Amiens, and includes 312 kilometers of submarine cable crossing the North Sea and the Channel. Ring One—the final splice of which was completed on February 16, 1999—will be ready for commercial service on March 15, 1999. Ring Two, which links Amsterdam to Essen in Germany and Paris to Bar le Duc, Nancy, and Strasbourg in France, will be completed by July 1999.

"Bechtel's people did an outstanding job for us with the construction and engineering of Circe's first ring and we expect the same high level of performance from them with Circe Rings Two and Three," said Michael J. Mahoney, Viatel's President and Chief Executive Officer. "Their hard work and dedication enabled Viatel to meet the very tight construction timetable we set for them without sacrificing our extremely high standards for quality."

Mahoney added, "We have an excellent working relationship with Bechtel and are pleased to have their people as part of the Circe team throughout the entire project's construction."

"The Circe Ring One Network set a new standard for installation in the industry," said Bill West, Project Director for Bechtel Telecommunications. "We'll bring valuable lessons and experience from this effort to all future Circe networks. With this experience, and the dedicated efforts of the Viatel and Bechtel team, we'll raise the bar once again to better our previous record performance. Viatel and Bechtel--along with our vendors, contractors, and suppliers--plan to maintain a pace that others in the industry will find difficult to match."

Viatel's Circe Pan-European Network is a next-generation, broadband infrastructure that is configured as three interlocking rings over 5,200 route-kilometers. The network will connect over 30 major European cities in the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. This state-of-the-art, high capacity, bi-directional, self-healing network will be capable of supporting data services (i.e., ATM, IP, and frame relay), multimedia and e-commerce applications, and voice telephony.

The network will employ Lucent Technologies' TrueWave RS (for "reduced slope") non-zero dispersion shifted fiber-optic cable, which is capable of utilizing dense wave-division multiplexing (DWDM) technology with synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) transmission standards. It will also employ Nortel Network's state-of-the-art multi-wavelength optical repeaters for crisp, error-free electrical and optical amplification.

Headquartered in New York, Viatel offers high-quality, competitively priced, national and international long-distance services—primarily to small and medium-sized businesses, carriers and resellers—in over 230 countries and territories worldwide. Viatel currently operates one of the largest alternative pan-European networks, with international gateway switching centers in New York and London, network points of presence in over 37 European cities, a direct sales force in 12 Western European cities, and indirect sales outlets in more than 150 additional locations in Western Europe.

For more information on Viatel please consult its web site www.viatel.com.

Bechtel is a global engineer-constructor with 100 years of experience and more than 30,000 employees. In 1997 Bechtel booked $12.2 billion in new work and worked off $11.3 billion in revenue. As of December 1997, Bechtel had more than 1000 active projects in 63 countries. Bechtel is headquartered in San Francisco, with more than 60 offices worldwide.

Bechtel's telecommunications group was formed in 1969 to support major Bechtel construction projects and has since grown into a full telecommunications engineering and construction services company capable of providing design, engineering applications, project management, and construction management for all types of telecommunications systems. Over the past 29 years, Bechtel Telecommunications has completed more than 80 projects and specializes in building telecommunications infrastructure for long haul fiber, local exchange carriers, and wireless service providers.