Anagran, Inc. is Awarded DARPA Subcontract Through HP to Improve Internet Performance.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Anagran, Inc., a network equipment company in the process of developing a next generation Flow State Aware (FSA) IP Router, today announced it has been awarded a multi-year subcontract through HP from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to improve performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

The Anagran program is to supply new hardware -- Flow State Aware (FSA) routers that will eliminate the confusion between congestion and corruption allowing TCP to jump directly to the maximum rate the network can allow. TCP slow-start was designed for slow (56 Kb), near errorless (fiber), and low delay (land line) networks. Today's router design also compounds this problem by discarding randomly (WRED) for congestion control, causing TCP to back off often, even if the flow is not yet up to the capacity of the network. Congestion and corruption both result in lost packets, thus totally confusing the sender as to the cause.

The flow-state technology at the heart of Anagran's router design will enable IP networks to achieve rapid TCP rate feedback, guarantee bandwidth for each flow, provide feedback of available network capacity and load balance among users. The time to transfer small-modest sized file transmission (like web pages) would be reduced from 6-10 seconds to .1-.6 seconds, an improvement of 10:1 up to 20:1 depending on the network delay and error rate. Across the U.S. over fiber, it would achieve 10:1 improvement and with satellites and radio links (which the military requires) the improvement can be 20:1 or more.

The dramatic TCP performance improvement is achieved by introducing new QoS Signaling. The protocol allows the user to make a QoS request to the network, and the network sets it up end-to-end, feeding back to the sender the maximum rate available, either guaranteed rate for video and voice or available rate for TCP. The user then knows lost packets are errors, not congestion, and can optimize a transmission correctly. "Although this is critical for the military, it is also extremely valuable for commercial users, improving the time for WWW based data entry 10:1 and allowing high quality near-lossless video and voice calls over IP," said Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts, Co-founder, CEO & President of Anagran.

About Anagran, Inc.

Anagran, incorporated in February 2004, is a communications company that develops small, innovative, cost-effective, fast, QoS-capable, IPv4/IPv6 Flow State Aware ("FSA") routers. Anagran's products are capable of supporting data, voice, video and TDM over one trunk at very high utilizations, in addition to providing accounting and traffic control and insuring the fairness of bandwidth usage. More information about Anagran is available at www.anagran.com.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Jan. 31, 2005, HP revenue totaled $81.8 billion. More information about HP (NYSE:HPQ)(Nasdaq:HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.