Data Connection Announces Immediate Availability of DC-SCTP Portable Protocol Software.

Business Editors/High Tech Writers

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)

March 15, 2001.

DC-SCTP provides OEMs with portable, scalable, fault-tolerant

source code for provider-class SCTP products

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

DCL can now minimize its customers' time to market by offering a full range of voice over packet software products. DC-SCTP can be easily combined with DCL's MGCP, Megaco, SIP, ATM and MPLS offerings to provide customers with a one supplier solution for their entire carrier-class networking protocol requirements.

DC-SCTP also offers proven interoperability with other SCTP implementations, following its successful involvement in the SCTP interoperability event organized by the SIGTRAN working group of the IETF at the MCNC Supercomputing Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.

SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) is a new IP transport protocol. It is designed to replace the use of the existing UDP and TCP transports for performance and security-critical applications. One example application is Voice Signaling where protocols such as SS7, ISDN or Megaco are carried over IP. SCTP provides a number of significant advantages over the existing protocols in the areas of performance, handling congestion and packet loss, and security.

The DC-SCTP product 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-SCTP integrates seamlessly with DCL's other converged network products using the same proven 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, pSOS, Chorus, Nucleus, OSE, Solaris, Linux, 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-SCTP is a high function, flexible, portable protocol product, which provides OEMs with a quick and easy way to build devices running SCTP for a variety of applications, including

--carrier-class availability and scalability for backhauling of POTS signaling protocols (SS7, ISDN, etc) over packet based networks (for example in Call Agents, SoftSwitches, Residential and Trunking gateways)

--reliable, high-performance transportation of packet-based (IP telephony) signaling protocols (SIP, Megaco, etc)

--transportation of Authentication, Authorization and Accounting protocols such as DIAMETER where reliability and auditability is key

--transportation for other transaction based protocols (such as HTTP) in scenarios requiring

--networking fault tolerance through protocol-level support for multihoming

--enhanced security protection from Denial of Service attacks

--superior performance in congested or lossy networks.

The rich feature set gives DC-SCTP the performance, scalability and reliability required for the most demanding networking applications.

"Voice over packet is rapidly becoming a vital part of the telecoms infrastructure," said Matthew Finlayson, Manager of Data Connection's Voice Networking Group. "DC-SCTP adds a key software component to our range of carrier-class protocol implementations. DCL licenses this technology to OEMs and works with them to build the devices that will underpin IP networks and to integrate them with the existing telephony backbone.

"OEMs require SCTP software which is robust, reliable and high performance. The DC-SCTP architecture has included these features from day one, along with fault tolerance, redundancy and portability. By utilizing our products and expertise, equipment vendors can reduce development cost and time to market, while being confident of meeting their customers' most stringent quality and reliability requirements. They also get the benefit of our continuing product development and an easy upgrade path to new features."

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.