Astral Point Becomes First Massachusetts Telecom Equipment Vendor Certified To New ISO 9001:2000 Standard; Quality Control Processes Certified Throughout Entire Organization.

Business/Technology Editors

CHELMSFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 29, 2001

Astral Point Communications, Inc., a leading provider of metropolitan optical networking solutions, announced today that it has earned certification of its management operating system from TUV Management Service (www.tuvglobal.com) to ISO 9001:2000 quality standards.

With today's announcement, Astral Point becomes the first of the 70+ telecom equipment vendors in Massachusetts certified to the new standard. The ISO 9001:2000 standard is a more comprehensive standard than 1994's ISO 9000 which focused on quality procedures within the manufacturing organization. The new standard incorporates eight quality management principles across the entire company: customer-focused organization, leadership, involvement of people, process approach, systems approach to management, continual improvement, factual approach to decision making and mutually beneficial supplier relationships.

"This is a tremendous accomplishment for Astral Point. Receiving ISO 9001:2000 certification confirms that we have successfully implemented sustainable and scalable processes throughout our entire business infrastructure," said Bill Doherty, vice president of operations at Astral Point.

Astral Point CEO Raj Shanmugaraj added, "Typically certification to this new standard can take up to year but we were able to accomplish this in six months. It shows an extremely high level of commitment from the entire Astral Point team. Our customers and suppliers are now assured that we have the necessary quality control processes implemented throughout the entire organization."

"Being a leader in implementing the new ISO standard reflects Astral Point's commitment to organization-wide quality-control processes," said Michael Arden, analyst with KMI Corporation. "The company has demonstrated a willingness to think long-term, whether it is taking part in the time consuming and expensive OSMINE process for integration into ILEC back office environments or achieving the new ISO certification. This positions Astral Point well to compete in optical networking equipment markets, including next-generation SONET, which will grow to $11 billion by 2005."

"By becoming ISO 9001:2000 certified, Astral Point has positioned itself as innovators in the telecommunications industry, exhibiting their commitment to quality in all aspects of the organization," stated Loukas Nakos, business development manager, TUV Management Service.

Astral Point has designed, built and installed some of the most innovative products in the market today to manage all types of bandwidth from low speed to light speed within metropolitan area networks. Its ON 5000 Optical Services Node streamlines voice and leased-line services and substantially reduces costs for metro optical network service providers. One of its unique features is its ability to digitally cross connect down to DS0 voice circuits, a major benefit to carriers that must support traditional telephony traffic.

The new ON 7000 Integrated Optical Transport Node incorporates best-in-class capabilities of a SONET/SDH add-drop multiplexer (ADM), digital cross-connect (DCS) and dense wave division multiplexer (DWDM) into a single platform that is one-sixth the size of the elements it replaces. The ON 7000 has the highest port density, switch capacity and grooming capability available today. The flexible architecture has been designed to support next-generation services such as Gigabit Ethernet, 10-Gigabit Ethernet and OC768.

About Astral Point

Privately held Astral Point Communications, Inc., of Chelmsford, MA, is pioneering the development of equipment to manage optical bandwidth for new types of services in the metro optical network sector. In addition to the new ON 7000 Integrated Optical Transport Node, the company's ON 5000 Optical Services Node and Galaxy Distributed Control Plane(TM) (Galaxy DCP*) software combine to maximize the use of optical power and simplify service deployments and upgrades. The company's ONset Optical Network Management System(TM) (ONset ONMS(TM)) enables service providers to add circuits in minutes from a single console and provide centralized network management. Additional information can be found on the Astral Point web site at www.astralpoint.com