Ascend and Xircom Announce Technology Partnership for ISDN Remote Access Interoperability; Xircom to Embed Ascend MPP Technology in Remote Access Products.

ALAMEDA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 13, 1995--Ascend Communications, Inc.(NASDAQ: ASND), a leading supplier of high-speed remote access equipment, today announced it will license its "Multichannel Point-to-Point" (MPP) protocol to Xircom, Inc. to provide enhanced interoperability between Xircom's remote site devices and Ascend's central-site MAX WAN access switches. Ascend's MPP protocol is a backward-compatible superset of the industry-standard "Multilink Point-to-Point" (MP) protocol for inverse-multiplexing in a packet environment.

"The standard MP protocol, which Ascend supports, specifies how equipment should distribute a single high speed data stream over multiple network channels for greater effective throughput," said Jay Duncanson, Ascend's co-founder and assistant vice president of strategic marketing. "But it doesn't define any ongoing communications mechanism between two endpoint devices for intelligent bandwidth management. Ascend's MPP protocol adds a low-overhead communications channel that allows endpoints to exchange telephone numbers and inform each other of current bandwidth requirements and channel availabilities. As a result, sophisticated bandwidth management features can be built into the equipment. For example, MPP lets equipment add channels to or subtract channels from a connection in real time, automatically adjusting the bandwidth to match changing traffic requirements."

Xircom's use of Ascend's MPP protocol will allow its customers, especially those calling internationally, to dial high performance network connections while keeping bandwidth costs down. MPP's dynamic bandwidth management capability provides users the same level of performance when remotely accessing the corporate network or the Internet that they expect from a locally connected workstation.

"Ascend has led the way in developing high-bandwidth technologies by supporting and enriching the evolving MP standard," said Carl Russo, vice president and general manager of Xircom's wired products division. "Ascend's MPP extends the MP standard to provide greater flexibility, reliability, and performance. It enables us to provide our users with the widest available range of high-performance connectivity options."

Xircom offers the mobile or remote user a variety of network access solutions, including analog and ISDN adapters for PCMCIA, ISAbus, and NuBus platforms. These products provide both client and server components for reliable, high-performance access to information and resources located on a corporate LAN or a service provider's network.

Ascend's MAX family of wide area network access switches support analog, ISDN, switched digital and frame relay dial-in traffic concentration and lets users replace all of their different access lines, adapters, routers, terminal servers and modem racks with a three-inch high box and high-speed digital trunks. The MAX provides cost effective dialed network access for large corporate sites and Internet providers because of its ability to aggregate simultaneous dial-in calls onto high-speed digital lines.

Founded in 1988, Xircom is the leader in the development and manufacture of mobile and remote networking solutions for the personal computer market. Xircom has shipped over 1.5 million PC Card (PCMCIA) and parallel port adapters to date. The company is headquartered in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and has regional offices in Mountain View, CA; Salem, NH; Washington, DC; Antwerp, Belgium; and Singapore. Telephone:[phone].

Ascend Communications, Inc. develops, manufactures, sells and supports a broad range of high-speed digital wide area network access products. These products use bandwidth on demand to enhance and extend existing corporate networks for applications such as remote LAN access, Internet access, bulk file transfer, videoconferencing, imaging and integrated voice, data and video access.

Ascend is headquartered at 1275 Harbor Bay Parkway, Alameda, California 94502. Phone: [phone] or 510/769-6001; Fax: [phone]; E-mail: [e-mail]. Ascend's home page on the World Wide Web is http://www.ascend.com.

CONTACT: Ascend Communications

Jerri Emm, 510/769-6001 or [e-mail]

or

Gallagher Public Relations 

Kevin Gallagher, 510/743-7830 or [e-mail]

or

Xircom, Inc.

Daphne Page, 805/376-6929 or [e-mail]