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Iomart to Enter BT Local Exchanges By Damon Marturion New Business News Staff Writer GLASGOW - iomart Group plc ("iomart"), the Glasgow based telecommunications and Internet services company, today announced a major step forward in its bid to become a major player in the UK broadband market. Headquartered in the West of Scotland Science Park in Glasgow, iomart is one of only three UK based ISPs to have earned the coveted Cisco Powered Network Status - a standard achieved by the top one per cent of service providers worldwide. For the company revealed that it is one of the successful applicants to be given the right to install its own broadband DSL infrastructure in BT's local exchanges. Focusing initially on the Scottish market, iomart will commence installation in BT exchanges in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee during early 2001. This forms the first phase of a wider UK programme. iomart is already one of the first operators to be providing ADSL services in the UK, using BT's IP Stream product range. These services are available now under iomart's Copperburst brand and also to consumers through Madasafish. However with the progressive introduction of its own equipment to BT exchanges, iomart will be able to participate fully in the local loop unbundling process, allowing iomart to take over responsibility for the copper line "last mile" between a customer's premises and the BT exchange. Angus MacSween, iomart CEO, commented: "This is another major step forward in the development of iomart. For us, ADSL is the entry point to building long term customer relationships to which we can add web hosting, telephony services and our business class out-sourced e-mail product from Sendmail. As a licensed telco with no legacy to protect, we can move swiftly to offer our customers the full potential from this new broadband technology." The installation plan will form the first phase of an aggressive three year UK DSL roll out, with iomart offering its customers a full range of DSL high speed access products coupled with applications such as video on demand, video conferencing and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Characterised by scalability, resilience, high security and superb performance, iomart's system architecture is based on best-in-class products by Sun, Sendmail, Cisco and Oracle. Redundancy is used throughout to avoid single points of failure. But technological innovation counts for nothing if it is not allied to first class customer care and service, iomart have invested heavily in its directly managed, purpose-built and fully web-enabled Customer Services Centre in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. For more information, visit the iomart Web site at iomart.com or contact Angus MacSween via telephone at 0141 931 7000 . . . watch for more stories coming soon   SEARCH NEW BUSINESS NEWS		Your ad could be here e-mail us at adinfo@ newbusinessnews.com New Business News? If you have new business news to share with other new businesses, send us your experiences and we could feature your business on New Business News.