Bob Metcalfe Appointed Advisory Director to the Metro Ethernet Forum.

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. -- Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com and now venture capitalist with Polaris Venture Partners, has also decided to put his talent to support carrier-class Ethernet across the metropolitan area. Announced today at SUPERCOMM 2004, he is joining the Metro Ethernet Forum as Advisory Director and will be looking to the future in a Metro Ethernet services market estimated by Gartner to reach $14 billion by 2005.

"The Metro Ethernet Forum is the kind of place I like to be," said Bob Metcalfe, "where standards, particularly Ethernet standards, gain momentum with organized efforts to knock down obstacles to market adoption. MEF's efforts have huge leverage in America's innovation machine."

"It means a lot to all of us to have Bob Metcalfe on board" adds Mark Fishburn, Chairman of the Board of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF). "He's seen his baby grow from a memo titled 'Alto Ethernet' circulated by him at Xerox's Palo Alto research lab in May 1973 to a worldwide standard which amounted last year to a shipment of 184 million 10/100 wired Ethernet ports. Now Ethernet is breaking out of the LAN and taking over the metropolitan area - it's a whole new challenge for a man who always claimed that his real achievement was not to invent Ethernet but to sell it so hard that it became a global standard."

"People don't need any more convincing of the advantages of Ethernet in simplicity, flexibility, familiar technology and low-cost mass-market equipment" explains Nan Chen, President of the MEF, "but they do need waking up to the fact that this is now available in the wider area as more and more major service providers are offering E-Line point-to-point and E-LAN multipoint Ethernet across urban areas. In the last year we have created standard specifications covering QoS, circuit emulation, user network interface, continuity protection and other key ingredients for seamless integration of data, voice and video across the Ethernet MAN. Bob's dedication - and his reputation - will help us get this message across that Metro Ethernet is already mainstream and now set to revolutionise the telecoms sector. We can also be sure that he already has his eye on some of the breakthrough applications like on-line gaming emerging in Korea and other Asian countries where there is already a vigorous domestic market for Ethernet services."

It took Ethernet around 20 years to become the dominant standard in the LAN marketplace. Judging by the success of the MEF, it will take barely a third of that time to dominate metropolitan networking - meanwhile we can be sure that Bob Metcalfe will be lining up his sights on the global WAN market. Watch this space.

More about Bob Metcalfe

Bob Metcalfe was born in 1946 in Brooklyn, New York and studied electrical engineering and industrial management at MIT before taking a master's degree in applied mathematics at Harvard - where his later PhD was in packet communication. His early work on hardware that would link MIT to ARPANET provided a foretaste of the future Internet - he now describes his 1972 tract Scenarios for the Arpanet as "the first Internet for Dummies". A seminal moment from those days was when a group of ten executives from AT&T were visibly delighted when his Arpanet demo crashed. "The only time in three days of demos that it crashed... They were smiling... happy that it didn't work" he commented. "I saw that there were people who will connive against innovation... and that has shaped my behaviour ever since." His next post, at Xerox, had him adapting the random access approach used by the Alohanet to coaxial transmission to link their Alto workstations, and that led to the birth of Ethernet.

In 1979 he founded his own company, 3Com standing for 'Computer Communication Compatibility', and continued to push Ethernet as the new standard for local area networks, eventually winning Digital, Intel and Xerox to the cause despite IBM's holding out for its own Token Ring system. During the early 1990s he worked at IDG's Infoworld Publishing as an IT publisher and pundit. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a respected authority on all things networking - every bit the gadfly goading the forces of technophobic conservatism.

About The Metro Ethernet Forum

The Metro Ethernet Forum is a non-profit organization created to accelerate the adoption of Ethernet in metro networks worldwide, the Metro Ethernet Forum as of June 2004, consists of 63 member companies representing a range of leading Ethernet service providers, major incumbent local exchange carriers, top network equipment vendors and other prominent networking companies. For more information about the Forum, including a complete listing of all current MEF members, please visit the MEF web site at www.MetroEthernetForum.org.

Note to Editors: Those press wishing to schedule a briefing with Bob Metcalfe, Nan Chen and Mark Fishburn following Wednesdays keynote session (in room S101 from 2:15pm to 3:30pm) should contact Mark Fox or Rich Williams of Zonic Group PR (details above).

There will also be an opportunity to meet the keynote speakers and other leading industry figures informally at a press cocktail reception between 4:45pm and 6:00pm in Regency Ballroom 'B' at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, adjoining McCormick Place.

Photographs of Bob Metcalfe are available on: www.zonicgroup.com/press_resources/MEF/Bob_Metcalfe