ERF Wireless Awarded Over $1 Million For Statewide Bank BranchNet Project

League City, TX - ERF Wireless announced that its ERF Enterprise Network Services subsidiary has signed a contract with Statewide Bank in Louisiana to install a BranchNet encrypted enterprise-class wireless banking network to interconnect the bank's remote locations throughout Southeastern Louisiana. The initial portion of the project will include construction of a 200-mile fault-tolerant, encrypted 60-Mb/s wireless and fiber network backbone looping from Covington, Louisiana, around Lake Pontchatrain to New Orleans, up the west side of the lake to Baton Rouge, and back east to Covington, covering about 2,000 square miles. The contract also includes 10 years of recurring revenues from delivery of monitoring, support and maintenance services to the bank.

Ron Dinwiddie, Director of IT for Statewide Bank, remarked, "The secure network being constructed for the bank will not only save us more than $2 million in data communications, long distance and courier costs over the next 10 years, it will also increase our bandwidth to individual branches nearly 20-fold. This network will allow our bank to add new digital services which will improve our efficiencies and lower the transport costs for other new digital applications -- such as voice-over-IP, video conferencing, remote document imaging, remote deposit by our commercial customers, item imaging and branch capture, better remote desktop support and branch IP security cameras viewable across the network."

John A. Burns, Chairman and CEO of ERF Enterprise Network Services, commented, "This is another large project involving the new Motorola Orthogon microwave radios incorporating spatially diverse point-to-point links that have historically proven to offer excellent reliability. We're installing monopole towers at certain branch locations and using additional towers provided by the Louisiana State Police via our Cooperative Endeavor Agreement for the backbone. To secure the network and provide fail-over routing, we'll also be installing our patent-pending CryptoVue security appliances at remote locations and at the main and secondary operations centers of the bank. Finally, we'll provide dual monitoring services of the network from our Network Operations Centers in Taylor and League City, Texas, using our patent-pending MonitorVue System."

David Pickney, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Statewide Bank, noted, "Statewide Bank's mission is to provide comprehensive financial services to support our communities that exceed the expectation of our customers, create value to our shareholders and a fair return on their equity, and create an environment for employees to work and grow in their careers, realizing they are our greatest asset. The efficiencies gained through the use of advanced digital applications that are available today and others that will be available in the future will help us attain our mission. We recognize that more bandwidth at a lower cost will be the enabler for our increasing voice, data and video communications traffic. ERF Enterprise Network Services affords us the opportunity to build a low-cost, state-of-the-art network that will vault us ahead of the competition."

Mike Moehle, Executive Vice-President of ERF Enterprise Network Services, commented, "The Statewide Bank contract continues to reinforce our position as the leading provider of high-speed encrypted wireless networks for banks in the U.S. and confirms we're on track to meet our goal in Louisiana of closing at least 20 BranchNet/US-BankNet sales and another 30 stand-alone US-BankNet sales out of the state's 282 banks and credit unions. If we meet that goal, the resulting revenues from the sale of BranchNet, US-BankNet, WiNet services and a host of other advanced digital applications over the next 10 years, would total over $250 million for the state of Louisiana alone. In addition, this will be another link in the statewide high-speed network being designed in cooperation with the Louisiana State Police to provide network redundancy for the State of Louisiana as well as to the Louisiana Banking community."

SOURCE: ERF Wireless Inc.