Bell invests in advanced new data centre to meet business clients' growing
need for hosted data services

Unique green approach to power and cooling at Bell's newest data hosting facility

MONTREAL, June 3 /CNW Telbec/ - Bell today announced that it will expand its national data hosting network with a unique new green data centre located in Markham, Ontario. The state-of-the-art facility will provide Bell Business Markets customers with co-location, managed hosting and next-generation services such as Infrastructure as a Service and Hosted Unified Communications - with interconnections to Bell's core voice and broadband IP networks, including a SAS70-certified MPLS network ranked best in North America.

"As the trusted provider of connectivity and services to Canadian business, Bell continues to invest in our National Hosting Services portfolio to meet the growing needs of our enterprise and mid-market customers for co-location, hosting and managed services," said Stéphane Boisvert, President of Bell Business Markets. "Bell's advanced new data centre will represent the state of the art in terms of both data hosting technology and environmental sustainability."

Through a partnership with Markham District Energy (MDE), MDE will provide Bell with green power and chilled water to run critical data systems, as well as natural gas powered backup systems. Longer term, MDE will recapture heat generated by the 50,000 square foot (4,645 square metre) centre's thousands of data servers to improve the efficiency of its own operations.

"Bell is eager to leverage MDE's highly efficient and fully redundant energy infrastructure to reduce Bell's energy footprint, while also providing unique opportunities such as capturing the significant heat generated by large-scale data centre operations for use in community heating," said Mr. Boisvert.

Bell's National Hosting Services portfolio provides managed data centre infrastructure services for mid- to enterprise-sized organizations to help them ensure high availability, security and compliance of their critical information technology. This mitigates business risk and helps improve the strategic focus of the organization's in-house IT resources. Bell's data centres are built to recognized industry best practices and provide numerous customer benefits:

High availability and security

    
    - Fault-tolerant world-class data centres built for security and uptime
      with minimum N+1 architecture
    - 24x7 infrastructure monitoring and management from Bell's Network
      Operations Centres
    - Strong service performance, repair intervals and service availability
    - Data security and storage solutions to help comply with regulatory and
      legal requirements.
    

Cost effectiveness

    
    - Maximum operational savings as a result of centralized servers and
      applications as well as consolidated networking
    - Hosting solutions that enable access to additional space and power when
      needed for quick and easy scalability, thus avoiding in-house capacity
      shortages and the costs of building excess space and capacity for
      future needs
    - Predictable monthly rates including space, power, connectivity and
      technical support eliminate capital purchases, ongoing investment and
      hardware maintenance costs for customers' systems environments.
    

Improve the strategic focus of in-house IT resources

    
    - 24/7 staff and Help Desk provide day-to-day infrastructure management
      and administration
    - Expertise of Bell's engineering group continually available to support
      the customer's IT team.
    

About Bell

Headquartered in Montréal, Bell is Canada's largest communications company, providing consumers and business with solutions to all their communications needs, including Bell Mobility wireless, high-speed Bell Internet, Bell TV direct-to-home satellite television, Bell Home Phone local and long distance phone services, and IP-broadband and information and communications technology (ICT) services. Bell is proud to be a Premier National Partner and the Exclusive Telecommunications Partner to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

Bell is wholly owned by BCE Inc. (TSX, NYSE: BCE). For information on Bell's products and services, please visit www.bell.ca. For corporate information on BCE, please visit www.bce.ca.

For further information: Julie Smithers, Bell Media Relations, [phone], [email protected]