Press Releases

San Jose, Calif., February 5, 2002 – CALIENT Technologies, a leading provider of intelligent, photonic switching systems, announces it has begun revenue-bearing customer shipments of its DiamondWave 256 switch to carriers in three global markets. The company has also completed full Telcordia NEBS™ (Network Equipment Building System) and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) certification of the DiamondWave, to validate full carrier-class reliability of its switching technology and systems.

“We are preparing to close several sizeable service provider contracts in 2002,” emphasized Charles Corbalis, CALIENT president and CEO. “Despite the market-wide slowdown in carrier evaluations and contract activity, the overwhelming economic advantages of photonic switching and GMPLS-enhanced service provisioning are very compelling to carriers.”

“We have built over thirty DiamondWave 256 systems, many of which are operating in carrier facilities, proving the switch’s ability to support multiple applications in a production environment,” continued Corbalis. “By the end of the year, we expect to be shipping across all of our target markets.”

CALIENT’s successful conclusion of NEBS and ETSI testing follows a yearlong regimen of internal testing in multiple network configurations. NEBS and ETSI validated the switch’s electromagnetic compatibility, thermal robustness, earthquake and vibration stability, fire resistance, compatibility with high voltage, airborne contaminants, EMC emissions, and susceptibility. CALIENT elected to be tested against the highest NEBS performance criteria, level 3, which includes, among other things, operation in Zone 4 earthquake environments. The full battery of internal and external testing and analysis has established DiamondWave’s reliability as fully carrier-class with 99.9999% uptime, and total device lifetime that will allow millions of switching operations over an expected 30 year lifetime.

"CALIENT has made solid progress in completing NEBS and ETSI test compliance in parallel with its carrier field test worldwide," said Nancee Ruzicka, program manager for the Yankee Group's Carrier Convergence
Infrastructure Planning Service. "These steps document and characterize the functions and reliability of the DiamondWave under consistent, controlled operating conditions, and should give worldwide carriers an effective measure of CALIENT's solutions."

About CALIENT Technologies
CALIENT Technologies is a leading provider of intelligent, photonic switching systems and software that help service providers scale their networks for explosive bandwidth demands and deliver new wavelength services. CALIENT’s DiamondWave™ switching system and GMPLS-powered networking innovations provide a seamless, ‘opto-electronic-to-photonic’ migration path that is non-disruptive to legacy operations, highly cost-effective and an enabler to revenue-generating optical services. CALIENT is shipping its DiamondWave systems to production networks worldwide. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California. Additional engineering and manufacturing operations are located in Santa Barbara, California, while MEMS design and fabrication operations are located in Ithaca, New York. For additional information about CALIENT, visit www.calient.net.

CALIENT Technologies, the CALIENT Technologies logo, and DiamondWave are trademarks of CALIENT Technologies, Inc.