Agilent Technologies' Industry-First Dynamic Testing Solidifies Real-World Verification for Lucent Technologies' Multi-Terabit Switch Router - Product Announcement

Cambridge Telcom Report, June 5, 2000

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) Wednesday announced delivery of Dynamic Terabit Testing (DTT) capabilities on its RouterTester platform. With the addition of DTT, Agilent is the first company to give next-generation terabit router developers the ability to test, evaluate and benchmark all aspects of the performance of their equipment, including both protocol and packet forwarding performance, under the rapidly changing conditions of the Internet. Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU), one of the first RouterTester DTT customers, will use the system to test and verify the real-world capabilities of its NX64000, the industry's fastest multi-terabit switch router.

"Agilent's RouterTester DTT capabilities offer the flexibility and high performance required to simulate real-world Internet conditions for network testing," said Peter Marconi, vice president engineering, IP Products Group, Lucent Technologies InterNetworking Systems. "We have used RouterTester DTT capabilities to test and verify the performance of our high capacity NX64000 Multi-Terabit switch router and found Agilent's system to provide reliability beyond that of other tools in meeting the rigorous requirements of the terabit routing environment. The RouterTester DTT gives service providers the confidence that the NX64000 can handle the dynamic traffic demands of today's networks."

Terabit routers must not only receive, process and forward billions of packets per second; they must also be capable of maintaining this performance in the face of a dynamically changing Internet environment, where thousands of new packet destinations are added, deleted or changed each second. One major challenge to equipment performance is so-called "route flapping," which requires routers, guided by routing protocols such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) or Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), to simultaneously update their complex internal address tables and reroute packet streams, while continuing to forward packets at terabit rates.

RouterTester DTT allows developers to create simulated, real-world test networks within their labs, define and insert events such as route flaps while routers are running at maximum speed, and evaluate the equipment's response and subsequent performance, all in real time. By integrating Internet-scale performance and routing protocol testing in one wire-speed, easy-to-use solution, RouterTester empowers engineers at companies such as Lucent to speed delivery of routers that can meet the escalating, real-world demands of next-generation networks.

FMI: www.agilent.com/comms/RouterTester.> Lucent's NX64000 is the first switch/router to support OC-192, has the highest capacity and port density, and is capable of scaling from gigabit to 6.4 terabit per second speeds. More information on Lucent's NX64000 is available on the Web at http://www.lucent.com/ins/products/nx64000.> Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) is a diversified technology company, resulting from Hewlett-Packard Company's plan to strategically realign itself into two fully independent companies. With approximately 43,000 employees serving customers in more than 120 countries, Agilent Technologies is a global leader in designing and manufacturing test, measurement and monitoring instruments, systems and solutions, and semiconductor and optical components. The company serves markets that include communications, electronics, life sciences and healthcare. In fiscal year 1999, the businesses comprising Agilent, then a subsidiary of HP, had net revenue of more than $8.3 billion. FMI: www.agilent.com.