WILLIAMS TO LAUNCH TRANSATLANTIC BANDWIDTH SERVICES
Williams Communications will launch network services to Europe by the end of Q2 using capacity on the forthcoming TAT-14 trans-Atlantic cable system.  Williams is currently evaluating plans to light dark fiber in Europe with prospective telecommunications partners.  Williams acquired dark fiber from Telia in a swap announced in March of last year.   http://www.williamscommunications.com/newsroom/newsreleases/2001/041101.html
Williams Communications, April 11, 2001

• Williams has appointed Peter Gardener as managing director for its European operations.  Gardener most recently served as general manager for Energis, where he was responsible for establishing a U.S. operation for the European company, as part of its strategy to become a major player in the global communications market.  
• Last month, the new TAT-14 transatlantic cable system was officially inaugurated and is now expected to enter commercial service in June.  The 15,000 km undersea cable links the US (two landing points), France, the UK, Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands.  The cable has four fiber pairs, each with 16 wavelengths of STM-64 (10 Gbps).  TAT-14 will have 640 Gbps protected capacity (1.3 Tbps total capacity) and is owned by a consortium of 50 carriers.

TOLLBRIDGE AND NORTEL NETWORKS TEAM ON VOICE OVER HFC
Nortel Networks selected TollBridge Technologies’ broadband voice gateway to provide voice services over a coaxial cable network for a major German operator.  The deployment will use voice over DOCSIS 1.1.  Deployments are planned to start in July 2001 and the bulk of the cable network upgrade is scheduled to be completed by 2003, potentially supplying more than 4.2 million homes in Germany.  http://www.tollbridgetech.com
TollBridge Technologies, April 11, 2001

NETLOGIC MICROSYSTEMS AND ZETTACOM PARTNER ON OC-192 SILICON
ZettaCom, a start-up developing high-performance optical silicon, will integrate NetLogic Microsystems' OPIX family of search engines into its Universal Switch Architecture product suite.  The NetLogic technology is capable of performing up to 100 million searches per second on databases consisting of up to one million entries.  The combined products could be used to provide highly granular quality of service (QoS) differentiation at full-duplex OC-192 wire speed.  http://www.zettacom.com/ 
ZettaCom, April 11, 2001

• ZettaCom's Universal Switch Architecture, which provides a core switching and protocol processing silicon solution for highly scalable, multi-service optical systems at OC-192, consists of a "ZEST" switch fabric chipset and a "ZEN" packet processor.  ZettaCom's "ZEST" multiservice switch fabric combines static circuit switching with dynamic packet switching.  It comprises two ICs, one that resides on a line card and supports line card speeds ranging from OC-12 to OC-192 (full duplex), and another IC for a separate switch card.  The ZEN packet processor is a packet classification and forwarding engine that performs Layer 2-4 functionality at OC-192 line rates.  A ZEN - LSP label processor used in conjunction with the ZEN - QM traffic management chipset performs label classification and forwarding along with sophisticated buffer management and bandwidth control for MPLS and ATM protocols at OC-192 line rates.  ZettaCom has also announced plans for a TDM Service Processor designed to provide flexible virtual tributary handling for SONET/SDH OC-192/STM-64 applications down to STS-1 level granularity.
• In February, NetLogic Microsystems secured $18 million from new and existing investors in its second round of funding to support its development of data plane solutions for next-generation OC-192 and OC-768 Layer 4+ networking equipment.  The company is based in Mountain View, California.

SIBERCORE AND ZETTACOM OFFER OC-192 PACKET REFERENCE DESIGN
ZettaCom and SiberCore announced an off-the-shelf, production-ready, configurable network processing OC-192 reference design for network equipment developers that combines ZettaCom's OC-192 network processing and co-processing functionality with SiberCore's CAM-based packet forwarding technology.  SiberCore offers a large capacity packet forwarding and classification co-processor based on ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) technology.  The device significantly increases switch and router throughput by off-loading packet forwarding and classification functions from the network processor.  http://www.zettacom.com/
ZettaCom, April 11, 2001

• In March, SiberCore raised $30 million in venture funding, including a significant investment from Xilinx.  The companies recently announced a joint interface between network processors and co-processors that they claim will quadruple router/switch throughput.  SiberCore is based in Ottawa, Canada.  http://www.sibercore.com

PMC-SIERRA ANNOUNCES PHY DEVICES FOR METRO TRANSPORT NETWORKS
PMC-Sierra announced new Serializer/Deserializer (SERDES) devices designed for high-density Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Infiniband optical module interfaces, and multi-gigabit serial backplanes in next-generation optical networking equipment.  The new QuadPHY-II, OctalPHY and QuadPHY devices could be used in gigabit/terabit switches/routers and multi service provisioning platforms.  PMC-Sierra's flagship QuadPHY-II offers a range of Gigabit serial backplane operation, from 1 Gbps to 3.125 Gbps, while supporting 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Infiniband (2.5 Gbps) optical applications.  The OctalPHY (an eight port SERDES) and QuadPHY (a four port SERDES) are the first multi-port gigabit SERDES devices with standard Gigabit Ethernet features such as Physical Coding Sublayer (PCS), Physical Medium Attachment (PMA), GMII (Gigabit Media Independent Interface) and auto-negotiation capabilities.  All products are currently sampling or available in production quantities.  http://www.pmc-sierra.com/pressRoom/pr/2001041101.html
PMC-Sierra, April 11, 2001

PMC-SIERRA LAUNCHES DSP CHIP FOR 3G WIRELESS INFRASTRUCTURE
PMC-Sierra announced an enhanced version of its PALADIN Digital Signal Processor (DSP) controlled power amplifier architecture for wireless infrastructure equipment.  Key features of the chip design are the ability to enable 15 MHz multi carrier WCDMA and cdma2000 applications without using costly, power-hungry, feed-forward radio frequency (RF) amplifiers.   http://www.pmc-sierra.com/pressRoom/pr/2001040901.html
PMC-Sierra, April 9, 2001

DATA CONNECTION RELEASES SIP PROTOCOL SOFTWARE FOR OEMS
Data Connection Limited (DCL) added support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to its source code product suite for network equipment manufacturers.  SIP is a new IETF protocol designed to control Internet multimedia conferences, Internet telephone calls and multimedia distribution.  Data Connection’s source code runs within the company’s existing portable execution environment and can be used to build devices running SIP.  The software provides support for all the relevant IETF SIP Working Group drafts and RFCs and other key standards, including those for carrying encapsulated traditional telephony signaling protocols within SIP (SIP-T).  http://www.dataconnection.com/press/sipannounce.htm
Data Connection, April 10, 2001

PIPEBEACH DELIVERS VOICEXML VOICE PORTAL
PipeBeach AB, a start-up based in Sweden, completed the installation of the first fully VoiceXML based voice portal for a mobile operator, the Swedish GSM operator Europolitan Vodafone AB.  The VoiceXML platform uses Philips Speech Processing's SpeechPearl 2000 speech recognition engine and Infovox text-to-speech synthesis to deliver a variety of voice portal services, such as weather, financial news, sport, traffic etc.  Because it is written in VoiceXML, users will be able to personalize the speech interface through the Europolitan Vodafone website.  http://www.pipebeach.com/
PipeBeach AB, April 11, 2001

ADTRAN DEVELOPS HDSL4 TECHNOLOGY
ADTRAN announced support for HDSL4 technology, which will be a four-wire counterpart to the HDSL2 (T1.418) standard.  ADTRAN said HDSL4 will be optimized for DS1 transport and will allow deployment with repeaters for additional reach while maintaining full compliance with the Spectrum Management Standard (T1.417).  The T1.417 standard specifies an allowable level of crosstalk that new technologies may generate when deployed with ADSL and other DSLs. HDSL4 is expect it to be finalized later this year.  ADTRAN is a contributor to the standards work.  http://www.adtran.com
ADTRAN, April 11, 2001

VBRICK INTRODUCES MPEG-2 NETWORK APPLIANCES
VBrick Systems announced a new line of MPEG-2 network appliances designed to provide DVD-quality video across IP and ATM networks.  Vbricks’ Model 4300 dual encoder features two MPEG-2 encoders for delivering two high-quality streams over one IP interface.  The VBrick Model 5000 decoder converts digital MPEG-2 video streams to analog video that can be viewed on standard televisions.  Standard video and audio interfaces include composite BNC, S-Video and audio in/out mini-jacks.  The network interface is 10/100BaseT Ethernet.  Optional ATM ports are available.  http://www.vbrick.com
VBrick Systems, April 11, 2001