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Calient Networks Enters All-Photonic Switching Market
Industry Leaders Team on New Vision to Meet Triple-Digit Network Growth

Sunnyvale, Calif., May 22, 2000 – Calient Networks today entered the emerging all-photonic networking market with the announcement of an intelligent, ultra-dense switch architecture designed to help service providers seamlessly migrate to an intelligent all-photonic infrastructure. The company is committed to providing the rate of rapid innovation and systems scalability necessary for the triple-digit per year traffic growth projected over the coming decade.

Calient Networks was founded in March 1999 by first-movers in the photonic, carrier systems, fast packet and networking industries. "The challenge of meeting today's skyrocketing growth requires a new way of thinking about switching systems," said Calient president, CEO and co-founder, Charles Corbalis. "Calient's team leaders were there at the birth of Frame Relay, ATM, SONET and optical cross-connect technologies and network builds. Our experience and fundamental belief is that only photonics can keep up with the Broadband Networking Age immediately on the horizon." The company is dedicated to helping carriers reap the massive performance boost of photonics, without prematurely retiring valuable, existing infrastructures. Calient will also support service providers' demands to develop and provision a new class of wavelength services for their end customers.

Market Dynamics

The last five years have triggered massive change across telecommunications, and have thrust exploding access/metro traffic volumes onto the core networks:

• Backbone traffic growth ranging from 100% to 1000% per year
• Greater than 2500 new network operators and 17,000 new ISPs
• A revolution in terabit routing, switching and transport systems
• Unprecedented innovation in access, edge, metro and core networks
• Many dozens of new network elements and protocols
• Insatiable user demand for more bandwidth, value, control and faster delivery

Pioneer Consulting, LLC, an international market research and analysis firm, forecasts a $31 billion five-year market opportunity in North America and Europe for optical switching vendors. In its recent optical switching systems report, Pioneer forecasts the requirement for optical switches supporting up to 4000 interface ports at speeds up to OC-768 (40Gbps). This explosion of switching capacity creates opportunities for dramatically different core switching architectures, to accommodate not only the accelerating shift from circuit-switched to packet-based infrastructures, but also the unprecedented rise in high-capacity trunk rates and trunk counts at the switch nodes (see Figure 1).

"As carriers continue to deploy DWDM in conjunction with 10 Gbps and eventually 40 Gbps line rates, they need rapid innovation at the switch nodes to deliver scalability, dynamic provisioning and support for all network topologies," said Scott Clavenna, Principal Analyst at Pioneer Consulting.

Further confirmation of the rise in switching capacity demanded at major nodes came in a recent report by Communications Industry Researchers, which forecasts that by 2004, individual cross-connect capacities will need to accommodate over 52,000 lambdas, a growth rate of nearly 400% per year.

Figure 1. Explosive Growth Pushes Core Capacity to Geometric Expansio

The Calient Approach

"Service providers today suffer from the Overbuild Syndrome," said Tim Dixon, Calient Vice President of Marketing. "They build out their infrastructure with one generation of technology, services and speed, and then in two years, they have to churn that infrastructure to meet new needs. It is devastating to their balance sheets. With an all-photonic infrastructure, we break the overbuild cycle. Not only will providers experience lower first costs, but by building a photonic layer that does not churn with every change in interfaces, speeds or formats, providers will lower their lifecycle costs by orders of magnitude. This is the big payoff from what we call Photon-Economics, as compared to legacy Electron-Economics."

Calient Networks aims to build industry leadership in all-photonic switching systems, photonic network migration, and next-generation network intelligence. Because the company's targets include mainstream carriers as well as next generation packet providers, the Calient architecture will support applications as diverse as SONET crossconnect relief and fiber frame upgrades, as well as wavelength management and multi-protocol lambda switching. The company's deep carrier network experience, progressive architecture and applications-oriented software approach enable this wide-ranging service set.

Calient will demonstrate its all-photonic switching system in Booth 655 at SUPERCOMM in June 2000.

About Calient Networks

Calient Networks is a new developer of intelligent, all-photonic switching systems that help service providers scale their networks for explosive bandwidth demands and deliver a new generation of wavelength services. Calient's architecture will provide a seamless ‘opto-electronic to photonic' migration path that is non-disruptive to legacy operations, and near-term opportunity for carriers to offer revenue-generating services from their photonic infrastructure. Founded in March 1999, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For additional information about Calient Networks, visit www.calient.net.