General Cable Introduces GenSPEED^® 6600 Enhanced Category 6E -‘Best In Class’ Engineered Performance

Highland Heights, KY, January 13, 2003 - General Cable announces its new GenSPEED 6600 Category 6E enhanced cable. This product’s engineered performance resides in a revolutionary design that provides the industry with the best performing Category 6E cable in its class. The GenSPEED 6600 construction utilizes innovative patent pending flat tape separators, providing Power-Sum Attentuation Crosstalk Ratio (PSACR) headroom of 9.9dB and 10.8dB at 100MHz and 250MHz respectively above TIA/EIA-568B.2-1 Category 6 standards. This enhanced Category 6E cable also performs with a positive PSACR beyond 400 MHz. As our flagship Category 6E product, GenSPEED 6600 joins General Cable’s Category 6 product line which also includes GenSPEED 6000 and GenSPEED 6500 cables.

GenSPEED 6600 completes a milestone within General Cable’s GenSPEED branding strategy of Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) premium performance cables. The driving demand to migrate high profile networks to Gigabit Ethernet has prompted the requirement for top performing enhanced UTP cable designed to support full and half-duplex operations. GenSPEED premium Category 5e and enhanced Category 6 cable products are designed to operate within 10Base-T through 1000Base-T protocol as well as exceed TIA/EIA-568-B.2 and 568-B.2-1 standards. All GenSPEED Category cables are third party verified for transmission performance. With multiple media and technologies to choose from, General Cable engineers a high-performance and cost-effective product line for today’s Gigabit Ethernet technology and beyond, supporting transmission speeds in excess of 1 Gb/s.

General Cable (NYSE: BGC), headquartered in Highland Heights, Kentucky, is a leader in the development, design, manufacture, marketing and distribution of copper, aluminum and fiber optic wire and cable products for the communications, energy and specialty markets. The Company offers competitive strengths in such areas as breadth of product line, brand recognition, distribution and logistics, sales and service and operating efficiency. Communications wire and cable products transmit low-voltage signals for voice, data, video and control applications. Energy cables include low-, medium- and high-voltage power distribution and power transmission products. The Specialty segment is comprised of application-specific cables for uses such as electrical power generation (traditional fuels, alternative and renewable sources, and distributed generation), the oil, gas and petrochemical industries, mining, industrial automation, automotive, marine, military and aerospace applications, power applications in the telecommunications industry, and other key industrial segments. Visit our website at www.GeneralCable.com.

Release No. 0407
01/13/03