August 9, 2001

Qwest's Unprecedented Optical Networking Capability to Enable Breakthrough Science Exploration and Discovery

DENVER, COLORADO -- Qwest Communications International Inc., (NYSE:Q) the broadband communications company, today announced that it will partner with four U.S. research institutions -the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego; Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill.; and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena- to build the world's most powerful network to support the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF) program. The DTF will be the largest, most comprehensive computing infrastructure ever deployed for scientific research.

Using its industry-leading wavelength services network, Qwest will provide the ultra high-speed network to interconnect these four research institutions, IBM will offer its geographically distributed Linux servers and Intel will supply its Itanium(TM)-family processors. The DTF network will consist of four 10 gigabit/second wavelengths for a total network capacity of 40 gigabits/second. The DTF network will be 16 times faster than the fastest high-speed research network available today^×enough capacity to transfer the entire contents of the world's publicly accessible Web sites among any of the four DTF sites in only two hours.

"This project reinforces Qwest's commitment to the research community by building on our previous projects, such as our involvement in Internet2 and the Abilene network, the NASA Research and Education Network, and the Energy Sciences Network, as well as the Global Grid Forum, which envisions a platform for worldwide shared computing resources," said Dr. Wesley Kaplow, chief technology officer of Qwest Government Systems Division. "For instance, Qwest committed $500 million to the Internet2 effort, which connects more than 180 higher-education and laboratory-research institutions and, much like the DTF network, is designed to accelerate the creation of tomorrow's Internet."

The NSF is a leading indicator of future bandwidth demand, and the launch of this network provides the latest and largest step in bandwidth demand, not unlike the NSFnet, which was the original core of the Internet. The pharmaceutical, automotive, biotechnology and petroleum industries, as well as others, will be able to witness the power of these incredibly high-speed network and computer systems, fueling the demand for network bandwidth to connect their U.S. and worldwide supercomputing systems.