Ascend announces new EtherFrame products for frame relay; low-cost, comprehensive frame relay solution targets corporations and carriers.

ALAMEDA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 6, 1995--Ascend Communications Inc. (NASDAQ:ASND) today announced a new set of frame relay products known as EtherFrame, that includes a new low-cost frame relay access router and new EtherFrame software for its MAX wide area access hub, allowing the MAX to support frame relay along with analog, ISDN, switched 56 and leased line traffic in one central site access hub.

Ascend's new EtherFrame products serve the needs of remote workgroups and individuals who need frame relay access to corporate networks or the Internet; large corporate locations with frame relay remote access concentration needs; and local and long distance carriers and Internet service providers that offer commercial frame relay services.

"Frame relay is an alternative to leased lines that, thanks to rapidly falling tariffs, is being adopted for remote access applications in addition to its traditional backbone network transmission uses," said Robert Ryan, Ascend's founder and CEO. "With this announcement, we've supplemented our product offering so that our Pipeline remote access family and MAX WAN access hubs handle not only leased and dial-up traffic, but frame relay traffic as well."

Ascend's new Pipeline EtherFrame is an Ethernet-to-frame relay access router which allows remote workgroups and individuals to access corporate networks and the Internet over frame relay. Priced at $1,695, the unit is one of the most affordable Ethernet-to-frame relay access routers available. The Pipeline EtherFrame comes standard with an internal DSU/CSU and has two independent 56 kbit/s channels for remote site routing and bridging.

Ascend's new EtherFrame software adds frame relay concentration capabilities to its MAX and Pipeline 400 WAN access hubs. Central sites can now use the MAX and Pipeline 400 to aggregate incoming leased line frame relay traffic along with traffic from dial-in analog and ISDN users. The MAX WAN access hub, base-priced at $10,000, allows 96 concurrent channels of dial-in traffic (including 48 analog modem calls) over up to four T1/PRI connections. The Pipeline 400, base-priced at $5,000, is a smaller access hub which supports 24 simultaneous dial-in users over a single T1/PRI circuit. EtherFrame software for Ascend's MAX and Pipeline 400 access hubs is priced at $1,000.

EtherFrame software also allows the MAX to function as a frame relay WAN gateway for local and long distance carriers and Internet service providers. Connected to a frame relay switch at the carrier's Point-of-Presence (POP), the MAX acts as a "POP-in-a-box" that accepts both analog and digital dial-in traffic from remote users who need access to a frame relay service. The MAX routes dial-in user traffic over permanent virtual circuits within the carrier's network to allow data from different subscribers to travel securely over a shared public network.

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]; Fax: [phone]; E-mail: [e-mail]. Ascend's home page on the World Wide Web is HTTP://WWW.ASCEND.COM.

CONTACT: Ascend Communications, Alameda

Jay Duncanson, 510/814-2303 [e-mail]

Gallagher PR

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