Atoga Introduces OAR 30 to Break the Barrier for Carriers to Roll Out High-Margin Metro Services.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 21, 2001

Atoga's Carrier-Class Solution Uses Tunable Optical Scaling to

Remove Bandwidth Constraints in the Metro

Atoga Systems, Inc., the industry's first provider of intelligent wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) solutions using tunable lasers, today introduced the Optical Application Router 30 (OAR 30). The OAR 30 boosts Atoga's award-winning solutions by introducing a larger capacity, carrier-class switching platform that enables service providers to take advantage of high-margin revenue opportunities, such as offering bandwidth-trading services and serving bandwidth-intensive applications like video conferencing and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) over their networks. In addition, the OAR 30's enhanced wavelength-grooming capability supports expanded service offerings in carrier networks. Designed for deployment in metropolitan points of presence (PoPs), co-location facilities (COs) or major data centers, the OAR 30 supports efficient use of network assets and vastly simplifies service operations.

Atoga will debut the OAR 30, available for trials in the third quarter of this calendar year, in Booth 2858 at SUPERCOMM 2001, June 5-7 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

"Providing legacy services while migrating to newer high-margin applications has been an expensive and technologically challenging proposition," said Scott Clavenna, president with PointEast Research. "Integrated systems often rely too heavily on compromises and do not deliver real value to carriers. Atoga's concept of integration is one that results in identifiable services creation, not just a smaller footprint and unified management. The OAR 30 extends this model to a highly scalable metro core platform."

The OAR 30, based on Atoga's FastApp(TM) architecture, delivers 30 Gbps of grooming capacity and creates a dynamically configurable network using tunable lasers. Because the new Atoga solution tightly integrates IP, Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) and WDM layers, carriers are enabled to introduce new IP services without jeopardizing revenues derived from legacy TDM offerings. Tunable lasers intelligently groom application traffic onto selected wavelengths, and additional traffic channels are opened as needed. Network-usage policies are conveyed across all network elements from a centralized policy server, and support for "cut-through" provisioning increases service velocity.

The OAR 30's advanced traffic-engineering technologies provide a simple Quality of Service (QoS) and traffic-prioritization mechanism that eliminates over-provisioning inefficiencies in carrier networks. Over-provisioning today is responsible for up to 40 percent of a carrier's total network costs in some cases. The OAR 30 controls customer traffic using more meaningful network parameters such as time of day and traffic priority, allowing a carrier to offer enriched grades of service-level agreements (SLAs).

"We are entering a stage where bandwidth is just one of the parameters on which high-margin, metered applications are brokered, and our solution is designed for that new environment," said Cuneyt Ozveren, chief executive officer with Atoga Systems. "With the OAR 30, carriers are no longer bandwidth-bound. Carriers are able to deliver new applications with attractive profit margins to reach new markets."

Traditional, element-by-element management in a metro network is cumbersome, labor-intensive and costly. Because the OAR 30 is an integrated platform supporting end-to-end policy management, fewer network elements need to be individually configured and managed. This feature cuts carrier capital and operating costs and, therefore, boosts profitability.

The OAR 30 also supports multi-level protection at the transport and DWDM layers to ensure carrier-class network reliability and performance. The OAR 30 provides SONET Unidirectional Path Switched Ring (UPSR) protection at the transport layer and wavelength protection at the DWDM layer using tunable lasers. SONET's rich fault detection and isolation capabilities, combined with the flexibility of tunable DWDM, create a highly resilient, fully managed infrastructure with survivability against node and link failures. Fault-tolerant data and control paths support 99.999-percent network availability.

About Atoga

Atoga Systems designs, develops and manufactures intelligent, integrated WDM platforms for the optical Internet. Atoga's solutions for the metro network allow service providers to increase service velocity through intelligent and simplified provisioning of applications and services. Atoga's integrated optical platforms enable service providers to broaden service offerings, increase the aggregate performance of their network infrastructure and radically reduce the total cost of operation. Atoga was founded in December 1999 and is located in Fremont, California. Visit http://www.atoga.com.

Note to Editors: FastApp is a trademark of Atoga Systems Inc.