COLT Telecom Supports Lastminute.com's European Operations with New Network Infrastructure

lastminute.com ready for summer peak with high-bandwidth pan-European infrastructure

HostReview.com
Thursday, June 24, 2004; 12:00 AM

24th June 2004 – Europe's leading independent travel and leisure website, lastminute.com, has awarded COLT Telecom a new three-year contract to provide a complete hosting and network infrastructure that will support the company's European operations.

As an extension to their existing relationship, COLT will provide a fully managed European IP VPN network, together with secure hosting facilities. This will give lastminute.com the flexibility and scalability needed to integrate its new acquisitions and grow its European customer base and partners in the future.

Following lastminute.com's recent acquisition trail, it needed a more scalable and cost-effective communications solution to support the significant increase in website traffic and inter-office communications.

"We have expanded our European customer base and product offerings enormously over the past few years through acquisition and organic growth and we needed a communications infrastructure that could support the increasing demands on our network at a price we could afford," said Luther Garcia, Manager - Global e-commerce Architecture, lastminute.com. "COLT has been a reliable infrastructure partner for several years and has a pan-European footprint that matches our new requirements well. They have also shown great flexibility and commitment in designing a solution to our changing needs and we feel confident COLT will support our growth effectively into the future."

Acting as lastminute.com's single pan-European infrastructure partner, COLT will deliver the following:

• Fully managed pan-European IP VPN network
COLT is currently rolling out a fully managed IP VPN Corporate service to an initial 12 offices across Europe, giving lastminute.com a single network and service level agreement for its entire European operation. lastminute.com chose COLT's IP VPN proposition as it will provide higher capacity network than the company's previous arrangements at a competitive price, together with the flexibility to expand the network and add further locations easily as the business grows. COLT will use five classes of service to prioritise business-critical traffic across the network and provide web-based reporting tools so that lastminute.com can check the status of its network at any time.

• Hosting lastminute.com is doubling the hosting space taken from COLT to cater for its expanding needs and will house its servers in one of COLT's highly secure data centres. They are directly connected to COLT's internet backbone and the IP VPN network, guaranteeing consistent availability of the lastminute.com website to users around the world. COLT will also provide full back-up services for lastminute.com.

Neil Atterson, Director of Strategic Accounts at COLT added, "lastminute.com's impressive expansion across Europe meant they had to rethink their communications requirements and we are delighted that they have retained us as their strategic infrastructure partner. This new agreement is testimony to our strong relationship and our expertise in delivering pan-European as well as national infrastructure solutions."

About lastminute.com
lastminute.com, Europe's leading independent online travel and leisure group, operates directly in thirteen European countries and participates in three international joint ventures, providing travel and leisure inspirations and solutions to customers. At 31 March 2004 lastminute.com had over 8.3 million subscribers to its weekly newsletter and had established over 16,900 supplier relationships. The business is based on the idea of matching supply and demand. lastminute.com offers consumers opportunities to acquire airline tickets, hotel rooms, holidays (both self packaged and third party packages), car hire, entertainment tickets, restaurant reservations and food delivery, speciality services, gifts and auctions.

About COLT
COLT Telecom Group plc is a leading pan-European provider of business communications services and solutions. The company owns an integrated 20,000 kilometre network that directly connects approximately 10,000 buildings in 32 major cities in 13 countries augmented with a further 42 points of presence across Europe and 11 Internet Solution Centres. COLT supplies customers across the full spectrum of industry, service and government sectors with unrivalled end-to-end network security, reliability and service.

COLT Telecom Group plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange (CTM.L) and NASDAQ (COLT). Information about COLT and its products and services can be found on the web at www.colt.net.

For further editorial information contact: Nicola Porter COLT Telecom Tel: + 44 (0) 207 863 5383 Email: nicola.porter@colt-telecom.com Vicki Cook/Henny Valder Brodeur Worldwide (for COLT Telecom) Tel: + 44 (0) 207 298 7113 / + 44 (0) 207 298 7075 Email: vcook@uk.brodeur.com / hvalder@uk.brodeur.com