BellSouth Helps Business Customers Prepare for Natural Disasters with 'Smart' Fiber Optic Service --Self-Healing Connections Provide Additional Assurance of Business Continuity, According to Florida Customers-- ATLANTA, Nov. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Unaccustomed as they are to discouraging students from attending class, officials of Stetson University in DeLand, Fla., were thankful to have that capability recently. Due to careful planning and communication services from BellSouth, the school was able to get messages out in the midst of a natural disaster. When Hurricane Frances roared through central Florida, she toppled 100- year-old laurel oak trees and left floodwater standing inside buildings on the 165-acre Stetson campus northeast of Orlando. With no commercial electrical power, power lines lying on the ground and limbs spread across roads, Stetson cancelled classes. But the question administrators were left with was how to communicate their decision to students and faculty and how to tell them when it was safe to return to campus. They turned to e-mail and their Web site, which, despite the devastation throughout the area, remained functional for the entire nine days the campus was without power. Bill Penney, director of technology at Stetson, Florida's first private university, credited BellSouth(R) SMARTRing(R) Service for the school's ability to keep communications flowing. "It made the job of the Emergency Management Team easier and saved us a tremendous headache," said Penney. "There was no power on campus, but we were able to send e-mail and to post pictures of the damage on the Web site so students and parents knew we weren't kidding when we said it was bad around here." SMARTRing Service is a dedicated, high-capacity network designed to provide increased reliability and functionality among multiple sites. The backbone of SMARTRing (Self-healing, Multi-nodal Alternative Route Topology Ring) Service is its ability to heal itself based on its redundant architecture. SMARTRing Service can be described as two paths of fiber providing a protective moat around an area such as the Stetson campus. If a single fiber is cut, the signal will travel over the second fiber. If both fiber circuits are cut, the signal reverses and travels around the remaining arc of the loop. SMARTRing Service also made life easier for government officials and residents of Seminole County in central Florida during the recent hurricanes and tropical storms. Seminole County added SMARTRing Service technology several years ago as its requirements for telecommunications services continued to grow. "When BellSouth first came to us with this technology, we were looking for ways to accommodate future growth," said Greg Holcomb, information technology manager for Seminole County. "But one of our criteria was also making sure we could handle major catastrophic events. If we were shut down, we wanted to make sure we could quickly reroute and bring our connectivity up at another location." Holcomb and other government officials may not have envisioned a series of events like the recent storms, but they are thankful they were prepared. As a result of the services in place, Seminole County experienced no outages. "Business continuity plans that incorporate communication systems give customers piece of mind that they can effectively operate, even under stressful conditions," said Joan Kratz - vice president of marketing, BellSouth Business. "BellSouth's voice and data solutions, with proper planning, greatly reduce the impact of natural disasters on an organization's ability to communicate to customers, suppliers and partners." About BellSouth Corporation BellSouth Corporation is a Fortune 100 communications company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and a parent company of Cingular Wireless, the nation's largest wireless voice and data provider. Backed by award winning customer service, BellSouth offers the most comprehensive and innovative package of voice and data services available in the market. Through BellSouth Answers(R), residential and small business customers can bundle their local and long distance service with dial up and high speed DSL Internet access, satellite television and Cingular(R) Wireless service. For businesses, BellSouth provides secure, reliable local and long distance voice and data networking solutions. BellSouth also offers online and directory advertising through BellSouth(R) RealPages.com(R) and The Real Yellow Pages(R). More information about BellSouth can be found at http://www.bellsouth.com/ . DATASOURCE: BellSouth Corporation CONTACT: Todd Smith of BellSouth Corporation, +1-404-226-8918, or Web site: http://www.bellsouth.com/ Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/095650.html

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