Telseon, the leading metropolitan network provider, and Internap Network Services INAP, the leading provider of intelligent routing services over the Internet, today announced an agreement enabling Internap to virtually extend its service into 50 data centers and carrier hotels via Telseon's Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) metro networks. The agreement enables Internap to leverage Telseon's footprint to expand its market reach and addressable customers at zero additional capital expense.

Under the agreement, Internap gains access to Telseon on-net locations in eight major markets with fast GigE interconnectivity between locations within those markets, including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Northern Virginia, San Francisco and Seattle. With Telseon, Internap increases its metro footprint without spending approximately $25 million that would be necessary to physically build service extensions in each data center. Additionally, Internap signed a reseller agreement with Telseon to offer its Gigabit Ethernet service nationally.

"This agreement expands Internap's market potential by giving customers fast and reliable access via Telseon's GigE Service to Internap's Overlay Network for intelligently routing data over the major Internet backbones," said John Scanlon, vice president of Internap Network Services. "This means that even more businesses can now leverage the public Internet as a viable and cost effective alternative to private networks."

The agreement combines the strengths of Internap's intelligent routing services over the Internet and Telseon's secure, reliable GigE metro data transport services to offer customers some of the fastest, most direct and efficient data transport services in the long-haul and metro for seamless Internet connectivity.

"Both Telseon and Internap share a goal of eliminating bottlenecks in the public Internet by offering fast, reliable, high-performance connectivity to enable businesses to optimize the potential of their Internet-based applications and services," said John Kane, chief executive officer at Telseon. "Combined, we offer an extremely powerful platform allowing businesses to build, deploy and scale their most demanding applications faster, cheaper and more reliably."

"Customers not only benefit from the speed and reliability of Telseon GigE connections to Internap Service Points in those markets, but also provisioning times between 3 and 5 days, compared to local loop service that can take more than a month to provision," said Paul Hanson, local access product manager for Internap Network Service. "Before this agreement was signed, Telseon passed Internap engineering tests to ensure that customers will receive the same high standards of service to which they have become accustomed."