NComm Releases First Standard Automatic Protection Switching (APS) Product for SONET Transport

Agere Systems provides hardware to complete a turnkey APS solution used by customer Telica in multi-service networking equipment

SALEM, NH - Monday, November 18, 2002 - NComm, Inc. today announced the release of NComm TMSÔ SONET APS, the industry's only standard software product for Automatic Protection Switching (APS) in SONET transport networks. Combined with integrated SONET interface evaluation hardware from Agere Systems Inc. (NYSE: AGR.A, AGR.B), the product allows equipment manufacturers to easily implement complete, standards-based APS solutions on a variety of current network platforms. The NComm TMS SONET APS is proven, high-quality source code that ensures superior APS functionality as well as much needed interoperability between different manufacturers' platforms.

"SONET carries large amounts of traffic. Therefore, customers and service providers were eagerly awaiting an APS implementation that was not only standard-compliant, but truly interoperable and dependable," said John Brandte, vice president of marketing and business development at NComm. "The release of our new product is a major step toward meeting the need for standard-compliant, reliable and interoperable SONET protection switching across a broad range of equipment and manufacturers."

"SONET is an extremely complex protocol on which to build customized implementations," said C. Michael Wallace, marketing manager in Agere's Access and Transport division. "Working together, Agere and NComm solved the difficult reliability and interoperability problems which arise from combining APS with SONET," said Wallace. "Together, we developed an off-the-shelf, turnkey solution for SONET protection which improves software development cycles by several months for equipment manufacturers. To better serve our customers, we incorporated Ncomm's TMS SONET APS into our market-leading Supermapper and Ultramapper framer products."

NComm TMS SONET APS provides the functionality to monitor single or multiple transport lines and, once a failure occurs, control and switch over multiple lines with no service interruption.

Telica, a leading provider of innovative softswitch-based voice and data infrastructure products, plans to implement the integrated NComm and Agere Systems solution. "It's very important for Telica to deliver reliable functionality to every aspect of our platform. Our decision to implement NComm's APS software was based on very positive experience with NComm's WAN interface products and NCOMM's reputation as a reliable supplier of critical WAN source code," said Joe Quinlivan, vice president of engineering at Telica, Inc.

NComm TMS SONET APS includes standard-compliant, tested and proven source code for the APS protocol, relieving the platform vendor of the risk and cost of a difficult custom development project. Because of its flexible architecture, the software enables use of, and interoperability between, different APS framer hardware and different (multiple or single) processor environments.

The unique features of NComm's TMS SONET APS product are:

• Consumes very little of the time allocated for protection switching for standard compliance
• Built-in bridge and selection control
• Self-healing protection functionality
• Easy-to-build, run-time configurable 1+1, 1:1 and 1:n systems
• Signal fail and signal degrade with configurable hold-off times-which are the bases of APS switch triggers
• Configurable wait-to-restore (WTR) timers
• Multi-processor ready

Pricing for an NComm TMS SONET APS license starts at US $20,000.

About NComm TMS
NComm's Trunk Management Software (TMS) portfolio of products includes T1, E1, T3, E3 , SONET and SONET APS technologies. Portable to any operating system, NComm provides its TMS customers with a fully functional device driver to interface with any industry standard framer. 

About NComm
NComm provides network equipment vendors with proven, standards-compliant Wide Area Networking (WAN) source code, software, and custom engineering. Its TMS trunk management suite enables faster time-to-market for network systems by reducing the development time for WAN interfaces from months to hours. The suite includes the turnkey software and source code to embed into WAN equipment, which performs all the framer, alarming, performance monitoring, line testing, and signaling functions that all WAN devices or products must have to operate. NComm, privately held and based in Salem, NH, has customers ranging from start-ups to well-established communications companies such as ADC, Nortel, and Sonus. For more information, please visit the NComm website at www.ncomm.com.

NComm and NComm TMS are trademarks of NComm, Inc. Supermapper, Ultramapper, Agere, Agere Systems and the Agere logo are trademarks of Agere Systems Inc.