Texas Instruments and Clarent Corporation Sign Agreement to Provide New IP Telephony Solutions for the Customer Premise - Company Business and Marketing

Cambridge Telcom Report, Jan 17, 2000

Texas Instruments (TI), the world's market leader in digital signal processors (DSP), analog and software for voice over packet applications, and Clarent Corporation (Nasdaq:CLRN), a worldwide leader in providing carrier-grade, phone-to-phone Internet Protocol (IP) telephony solutions, announced Tuesday that they have signed an IP telephony product development agreement. The agreement is intended to bring IP telephony broadband access capabilities to the remote access market with a new family of customer premise equipment (CPE), which brings IP telephony service over the new "local loop" of broadband access technologies, including DSL, cable and wireless. The new devices will be designed to work with business customers' regular telephones.

The new CPE devices are intended to bring significant benefits to the market by capitalizing on the industry leading positions and technologies provided by Texas Instruments and Clarent. Texas Instruments is a leading supplier of DSP technology for broadband applications. Clarent is a leading supplier of IP telephony technology to carriers worldwide. The CPE devices are designed to communicate with Clarent-based IP telephony technology installed in carriers' central offices and IP telephony clearinghouse providers' networks around the world, giving business customers access to a global footprint for their IP telephony-based communications. By doing this, these business customers should have the benefits of end-to-end IP telephony technology for global calling.

This new device is expected to be the first product to provide standards-based Voice over IP end-to-end.

The Texas Instruments and Clarent solution is designed to include several components. The first component will be a new CPE device. This CPE device is intended to allow the exchange of IP telephony-based calls through DSL, cable and wireless local loop technologies, to and from the business customer's telephone set. The new devices will be based on Texas Instruments' market leading TMS320C54x DSP generation and a hardware reference design and Voice over IP embedded communications software from TI's Telogy Networks subsidiary. Telogy's market leading Golden Gateway software includes MGCP functionality, and efficiently and effectively addresses Quality of Service (QoS) issues such as network delay, jitter and lost packets. It also incorporates compression, line echo cancellation (G.168 compliant) and tone detection. The CPE device is also planned to include MGCP client extensions and network management software components built by Clarent Corporation. The devices are expected to be distributed to the end user by IP telephony service providers.

The second component consists of Clarent IP telephony products that are already present in the carriers' networks and which allow the customers' calls to be routed globally using Voice over IP technology. These products include Clarent Gateways, Clarent Command Center and Clarent Call Manager. It is through these Clarent IP telephony components installed in the networks of a large base of carriers and IP telephony global clearinghouses, that the business customers' calls may be able to terminate anywhere in the world.

"Texas Instruments is very pleased to sign this important strategic agreement with Clarent Corporation," said Bill Witowsky, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Telogy Networks, a Texas Instrument Company. "This agreement takes advantage of our two companies' industry leading, complementary technologies and market positions, to bring the cost and feature benefits of IP telephony directly to small and medium business customers around the world. With our combined products, and with the existing large deployments of Clarent's products in carrier networks around the world, business customers should have immediate access to end-to-end IP telephony solutions for global calling."

"Clarent is very excited about our agreement with Texas Instruments," said Mike Vargo, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Clarent Corporation. "This is the first industry solution that brings IP voice directly to the local loop through a variety of broadband access mediums and, at the same time, gives these business customers access to carrier IP telephony global networks and IP telephony clearinghouses for worldwide calling. This will both improve and expedite network convergence, and Clarent is thrilled to be working with Texas Instruments to drive it."

The CPE product is expected to start field tests in the spring of this year, with general availability later in the year.

The worldwide leader and pioneer in digital signal processing solutions since 1982, Texas Instruments provides innovative DSP and mixed signal/analog technologies to more than 30,000 customers in the computer, wireless communications, networking, Internet, consumer, digital motor control and mass storage markets worldwide. Telogy Networks, a wholly owned subsidiary of Texas Instruments, is the leading provider of embedded communications software to global equipment manufacturers.