US LEC EXPANDS MPLS VPN DATA NETWORK.

US LEC Corp. (NASDAQ:CLEC), Charlotte, N.C. a full-service provider of IP, data and voice solutions to businesses and enterprise organizations throughout the Eastern United States, has announced the expansion of its MPLS VPN data network that can now provide scalable and secure connectivity both nationally and internationally.

"US LEC is expanding our MPLS VPN service in response to substantial customer demand, allowing us to better serve multi-location customers on a national level while also providing international connectivity," said Jeffrey Blackey, US LEC senior vice president of marketing and business development. "We now have the ability to provide flexible, secure communications options to customers' headquarters, branch offices and facilities outside of our previously established 16-state footprint."

US LEC MPLS VPN service provides a robust solution for businesses that allows data traffic with differing requirements to co-exist on the same network, such as Internet access, enterprise-wide inter-office VoIP calling and critical business applications such as Customer Resource Management applications.

MPLS VPN offers a considerable improvement to legacy data networking solutions through its meshed network architecture. Previous data networking solutions offered a "hub and spoke" network design that made the "hub" a single point of failure for all applications. MPLS VPN is built on a "meshed" architecture and eliminates the requirement for a central host that can become a bottleneck. Speeds may also be scaled incrementally from fractional T-1 speeds below 1.544 Megabits per second (Mbs) to DS3 (up to 45 Mbs) to Ethernet Local Loop at 100 Mbs.

MPLS VPN supports quality of service (QoS) guarantees, allowing US LEC customers to prioritize traffic. With traffic prioritization, the most important traffic travels over available bandwidth first with other traffic utilizing remaining bandwidth. As priority traffic decreases, all other traffic uses available bandwidth. Better bandwidth utilization helps businesses reduce the amount of bandwidth needed, reducing costs and improving a business' ability to utilize its bandwidth investment effectively.

"An MPLS solution provides US LEC customers the survivability for business continuity and a data networking service that can grow incrementally as the business grows," said Alan Fitzpatrick, US LEC senior vice president of engineering. "This expansion now gives an even broader avenue for growth, including branch offices both located outside our U.S. markets and internationally."

About US LEC

Based in Charlotte, N.C., US LEC is a full-service provider of IP, data and voice solutions to medium and large businesses and enterprise organizations throughout 16 Eastern states and the District of Columbia. US LEC offers advanced, IP-based, data and voice services such as MPLS VPN and Ethernet, as well as comprehensive Dynamic TSM VoIP-enabled services and features. The company also offers local and long distance services and data services such as frame relay, Multi-Link Frame Relay and ATM. US LEC provides a broad array of complementary services, including conferencing, data backup and recovery, data center services and Web hosting, as well as managed firewall and router services for advanced data networking. US LEC also offers selected voice services in 27 additional states and provides enhanced data services, selected Internet services and MegaPOP(R) (local dial-up Internet access for ISPs) nationwide.

For more information, visit http://www.uslec.com or call 704/319-6875