Data Connection Announces Availability of Megaco Support in DC-MGCP/DC-Megaco Protocol Software.

Business Editors/High Tech Writers

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 3, 2001

Product family provides OEMs with portable, scalable, fault-tolerant

source code for carrier-class MGCP and Megaco/H.248 products

Data Connection Limited (DCL), the world's leading provider of carrier-class communications protocol source code, today announced that version 1.0 of DC-Megaco has been released.

This adds support for the Megaco/H.248 media gateway control protocol to DCL's highly successful DC-MGCP/DC-Megaco product family. The common architecture between DC-MGCP and DC-Megaco allows OEMs an easy migration path between the two protocols.

DC-Megaco offers proven interoperability with other Megaco implementations following DCL's successful involvement in the Megaco interoperability event held last month at the University of New Hampshire and sponsored by the Multiservice Switching Forum, the International Softswitch Consortium and the UNH interoperability labs.

MGCP and Megaco/H.248 are media gateway control protocols defined through the IETF and ITU-T for use in distributed switching environments, where signalling logic is located on Media Gateway Controllers (MGCs - also known as Call Agents or SoftSwitches) and media logic is located on Media Gateways (MGs). Using MGCP or Megaco/H.248, MGCs can control MGs to set up media (e.g. voice traffic) paths through the distributed network. This architecture allows for specialisation of function and economies of scale and is expected to become the architecture of choice in next generation converged voice/data IP networks.

The DC-MGCP/DC-Megaco product family provides OEMs with a flexible source code solution with the same high quality architecture and support for which DCL's other communications software is renowned. DC-MGCP and DC-Megaco run within DCL's existing high performance portable execution environment - the N-BASE. This provides extensive scalability and flexibility and enables the distribution of protocol components across different hardware configurations. The N-BASE has been ported to a large number of operating systems including VxWorks, OSE, pSOS, Chorus, Nucleus, Solaris, HP-UX and Windows NT, and has been used on all common processors including x86, i960, Motorola 860, Sparc, IDT and MIPS. Proprietary OSs and chipsets can be supported with minimal effort. In addition, pre-ported solutions are available on a range of operating systems including VxWorks, Solaris, Windows and Linux. DC-MGCP and DC-Megaco are high function, flexible, portable protocol products that provide OEMs with a quick and easy way to build devices running MGCP and Megaco.

Key features of the DC-MGCP/DC-Megaco product family include

--support for all IETF Working Group Drafts (including RFC2705 and RFC3015), ITU-T standards (including H.248) and other key standards (such as PacketCable/NCS)

--full customization options allowing OEMs to quickly and easily add new packages and configure the behavior of commands and parameters

--highly scalable association and transaction management architecture

--full support for Megaco's text and binary/ASN.1 encodings.

"The joint IETF/ITU Megaco standard provides a significant step forward in the management of distributed Media Gateway/Media Gateway Controller functionality," said Matthew Finlayson, Manager of Data Connection's Voice Networking Group. "We are seeing growing interest in Megaco throughout the industry, and the common architecture between DC-MGCP and DC-Megaco means that OEMs are using them to build carrier-class solutions offering a simple, fast migration between MGCP and Megaco support."

"Equipment vendors wishing to produce quality telephony solutions need flexible MGCP and Megaco components which combine rapid time-to-market with high levels of scalability, robustness and performance. The DC-MGCP/DC-Megaco architecture is uniquely positioned to satisfy these requirements. Customers also receive the additional benefits of DCL's world-class support services and an easy upgrade path to additional function."

About Data Connection Limited

Data Connection Limited (DCL) is the leading independent developer and supplier of MPLS, SIP, MGCP/Megaco, SCTP, ATM, Conferencing, Unified Messaging, Directory and SNA portable products. Customers include 3Com, Cabletron, Cisco, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM Corp., Lucent, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, NCR, SGI and Sun. Data Connection is headquartered in London UK, with US offices in Reston, VA and Alameda, CA. It was founded in 1981 and is privately held. During each of the past 19 years its profits have exceeded 20% of revenue. Last year sales exceeded $30M, of which 90% were outside the UK, mostly in the US, leading to the company's second Queen's Award for outstanding export performance. For information, contact Matthew Finlayson by email at [e-mail], phone [phone], or visit our Web site at http://www.dataconnection.com.

Data Connection is a trademark of Data Connection Limited and Data Connection Corporation. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.