Astral Point Announces Four Optical Netwoking Patents; Highlights World-Class Innovation.

Business/Technology Editors

CHELMSFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 10, 2000

- Recently named a Forbes Magazine "Young Gun", Astral Point shows

engineering talent and experience match savvy of highly-regarded

management team -

Astral Point Communications, a pioneer in optical networking and recently named a Forbes Magazine `Young Gun,' today announced four significant patents pending imminent approval. The patents, filed by Astral Point Chief Technology Officer and IEEE fellow Dr. Pierre A. Humblet, cover an array of unique optical networking approaches that underscore the company's ability to provide carriers with efficient, revenue-generating solutions for vastly improving metropolitan networks.

Astral Point's four patents (outlined below) will enable carriers to construct flexible and highly scaleable mesh topology networks that include innovative protection and restoration capabilities, as well as unique remote management capabilities. In addition, carriers can eliminate lengthy planning cycles; significantly improve provisioning speed and lower provisioning costs; scale to support huge networks; and flexibly add incremental services where needed.

"The unique and exclusive technology behind these patents demonstrates Astral Point's ability to apply our deep industry experience to solving rapidly emerging and increasingly widespread problems with today's networks," said Astral Point CEO Raj Shanmugaraj. "Our patented approach provides a Forecast Tolerant Network that will enable carriers to rapidly and efficiently respond to exploding bandwidth requirements, while scaling to support huge networks. Also, our approach significantly improves provisioning speed, greatly reduces provisioning costs, and provides remote management capabilities. All of these capabilities add up to an extremely compelling offering in this highly competitive industry."

Following are summaries of Astral Point's four patent filings with the U.S. Patent Office:

-"Method and Apparatus for Protection in a Communications Network"

--A fast, reliable and scaleable protection and restoration in a scaleable mesh network.

-"Optical Device Management Bus"

--A mechanism providing visibility into the configuration and topology of the optical lightpath allowing remote network management.

-"Low Loss, Expandable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer"

--A method for reducing cost while improving performance and scalability of add/drop multiplexers used in optical networks.

-"Method and Apparatus for Point-to-Point and Point-to-Multipoint Connections in a Communications Network"

--An algorithm that emulates configuration ease and transparency of Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) with very high levels of efficiency.

"These pending patents will make Astral Point a significant and strong player in the optical networks space," said Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects. "Optical networking is an extremely hot market space. This announcement should give competitive technological advantage to Astral Point products and also create a stumbling block for latecomers into the space."

About Astral Point: Privately held and located in Chelmsford, MA, Astral Point is a pioneer of optical networking equipment for the metropolitan carrier market. The company has developed a new generation of optical access transmission systems based on its patent pending Optical Services Architecture(TM). These systems enable carriers to provide profitable, network-based services and efficiently aggregate traffic from low-speed networks to high-speed optical networks. Additional information can be found on the Astral Point web site at www.astralpoint.com.