General Bandwidth Appoints New Vice President of World-Wide Sales and Vice President of Marketing

Business Wire, Oct 19, 2004

AUSTIN, Texas -- General Bandwidth, a leading Voice Over IP (VoIP) telecommunications equipment manufacturer, today announced the appointment of Robert Vrij as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Jody Bennett as Vice President of Marketing. By bringing a wealth of experience in managing fast-growth technology companies, Bennett and Vrij, join General Bandwidth to drive sales of the industry's leading gateway, the G6(R).

Robert Vrij is a seasoned and highly accomplished telecom industry executive with a consistent track record of producing top sales results in most all of the major domestic and international customer market segments. During Vrij's tenure at Lucent Technologies as Vice President of Sales, he led sales organizations selling circuit, packet, IP, optical, access, and wireless networks into CLEC, undersea cable and integrator, RBOC, and foreign PTT and MSO markets. In his last assignment at Lucent, Vrij was President of Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) where he managed approximately $2B in revenue. During his tenure at AT&T/Unisource, he managed a global indirect channel of 37 of the most prominent PTT's around the world driving more than $300M of sales through this channel. Vrij has also held senior executive sales positions at Voxpath Networks and NextiraOne.

Jody Bennett brings nearly 20 years of telecommunications experience to General Bandwidth. Jody comes from Taqua, Inc., where he was vice president of marketing, leading the company's strategic marketing initiatives, including business development and marketing communications prior to the company's acquisition by Tekelec in April 2004. Following Taqua's acquisition by Tekelec, Jody lead Tekelec's solutions strategy and product line branding efforts. Before joining Taqua in 2003, he held sales and business development management positions at Santera Systems, Inc. Jody also worked previously in sales, product management, technical support, and engineering positions at Nortel Networks.

According to Charlie Vogt, General Bandwidth's President and CEO, "General Bandwidth is in an excellent position to capitalize on a rapidly expanding VoIP market by combining our industry-leading G6 media gateway and Vrij and Bennett's proven ability to expand sales and market presence," said Vogt. "We will benefit greatly from results-oriented, entrepreneurial vision and energy that these executives bring to the table."

About General Bandwidth

General Bandwidth provides "Solutions for a VoIP World(TM)" with deployments across more than 40 domestic and international customers while enabling applications such as PacketCable(TM) cable telephony, VoIP Business Services, and SIP-based IP Centrex. Deployed for more than 4 years, General Bandwidth's flagship product, the G6(R) VoIP Media Gateway, delivers high quality, full-featured voice services over a wide variety of packet architectures, including hybrid fiber coax (HFC), FTTP, DSL, and T1/E1. With the capability to simultaneously support voice services from next generation softswitches and Class 5 switches, the G6 platform is a highly scalable, fully redundant, and very flexible service migration platform from which new voice and media features can be deployed. A TL9000 certified company, General Bandwidth has attained nearly every certification for the G6 platform required to rapidly deploy VoIP services including OSMINE, RUS, NEBS-3 as well as CableLabs(R) PacketCable qualification.

Trademark notes: G6 and General Bandwidth are registered trademarks of General Bandwidth Inc. CableLabs and PacketCable are trademarks of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.