Spirent Communications Extends Its Award-Winning Line of Generator/Analyzers for Core and Metro/Edge Networks.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

Networld+Interop Atlanta 2002

ROCKVILLE, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 26, 2002

Spirent's new test equipment exceeds the power and performance of

other solutions

Spirent Communications(TM), a wholly owned business group of Spirent plc (NYSE:SPM and LSE:SPT) today announced its new AX/4000 routing solution, the mAX IP EX, which builds on the company's award-winning mAX IP technology. The capabilities of this solution are key to evaluating the stability, scalability and performance of router technology and services for core and metro/edge networks. The high-performance, upgradeable CPU boasts clock speeds well beyond 1 GHz, which result in 100x the routing emulation performance of existing designs. mAX IP EX's flexible architecture also allows users to upgrade the CPU when faster systems are available or needed. mAX IP EX will be demonstrated at N+I, Atlanta, September 10-12, 2002 (booth #2235).

"mAX IP EX's role in the overall deployment of next generation networks is critical, particularly with the scalability, stability, and performance that service providers and carriers need to validate in their labs, prior to deployment" said Bahaa Moukadam, vice president of product marketing, Spirent Communications. "Our customers have been searching for high end testing tools that exceed the performance limits of their network devices. With the mAX IP EX, it is now possible to increase the scalability limits of our test solution to stay well ahead of performance boosts on the devices under test."

mAX IP EX supports unprecedented router protocol scalability testing on a per port level. By supporting 1000 BGP peers per port, vendors can test their latest generation metro-edge devices targeted for BGP/MPLS VPN networks. The mAX IP EX allows simultaneous emulation of 1000 BGP nodes, advertisement of prefixes and full line rate traffic generation and analysis for a wide range of network interfaces. This capability supports full stress-testing in the lab before product deployment.

The mAX IP EX also offers enhanced support for IPv6, as well as functional, conformance and performance testing of the latest protocols, including: BGPv4, OSPF-TE, IS-IS-TE, RSVP-TE and LDP/CR-LDP. The new G/A also supports functional and performance testing of BGP/MPLS VPNs, as defined in the RFC-2547 specification, and L2 frames over MPLS, as defined in the Martini IETF drafts.

mAX IP EX provides comprehensive generation and analysis,

including:

-- 4094 test streams -- full, real-time live statistics for all streams

-- Full line-rate data plane and simultaneous full control plane performance analysis

-- Comprehensive IPv6 generation and analysis

-- Data capture and protocol decodes

The mAX IP EX also supports existing AX/4000 IP interface cards, which will help preserve customer investment in test hardware. Also, Tcl library support is backwards compatible to save on the investment of automation scripts.

About Spirent Communications

Spirent Communications is a worldwide provider of integrated performance analysis and service assurance systems for next-generation network technologies. Spirent's solutions accelerate the profitable development and deployment of network equipment and services by emulating real-world conditions in the lab and assuring end-to-end performance of large-scale networks. www.spirentcom.com

Spirent Communications is a wholly owned business group of Spirent plc, an international network technology company. Spirent plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange (ticker: SPT). The company is also listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker: SPM; CUSIP number: 84856M209). www.spirent.com

Spirent, Spirent Communications, the Spirent logo and TeraMetrics are trademarks or registered trademarks of Spirent plc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are held by their respective companies. All rights reserved.

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