Internet Telephony: VIP Calling Raises the Bar in International Internet Telephony Services with Assured Quality Routing Version 2.0 - Company Business and Marketing

EDGE, On & About AT&T, April 5, 1999

VIP Calling, Inc., the leading provider of wholesale international Internet telephony services, Monday announced the highest quality of service available on the global wholesale market with Assured Quality Routing Version 2.0. Assured Quality Routing, announced and fully operational since summer 1998, initially set the industry's standard of excellence for toll-quality IP telephony routing.

AQR 2.0 is pioneering software that dynamically reroutes traffic from the Internet to the PSTN as a result of triggers from a set of tools that monitor the performance of the public Internet on a continuous basis. AQR 2.0 enables VIP Calling to deliver toll quality service with public Internet-based costs. The VIP Calling Network is optimized to deliver low latency and packet loss, high voice quality, no echo, high call completion, and low post-dial delay with one-stage dialing. The effectiveness of AQR 2.0 is evidenced by the high volume of traffic from tier-one carriers who use the VIP Calling service undifferentiated from the legacy circuit switched traffic.

"As a VoIP network designed from the beginning to support the rigorous quality demands and high volume loads of PTTs and carriers around the world, the VIP Calling Network continues to hold the high water mark for Quality of Service and robustness," said Dr. Judy Reed Smith, CEO, Atlantic-ACM.

As a Cisco Powered Network with three hubs or "Super PoPs" (Points of Presence) in New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong, the VIP Calling Network features extensive automated rerouting algorithms that are enhanced by the integration of Cisco Management Information Base (MIB). VIP Calling routes IP packets intelligently over multiple Internet backbones including direct DS3 connections to AboveNet, AT&T, MCI/Worldcom, Sprint and UUNet. This ensures a quality connection that VIP Calling customers can depend on 100% of the time. The VIP Network is also based on open standards and is H.323 compliant.

VIP Calling has also selected the Netcool software suite from Micromuse, Inc. (Nasdaq: MUSE) to provide added network monitoring for its state-of-the-art Network Operations Center (NOC). Netcool will provide VIP Calling with a detailed view of events throughout the company's international IP telephony network. These detailed views will enable additional monitoring that is crucial for AQR procedures that marry packet and circuit switching to automatically re-route calls to the PSTN whenever the public Internet cannot provide customers with toll-quality service. The deployment of Netcool is especially strategic as the traffic on the VIP Calling Network continues to grow rapidly from month to month. VIP Calling's Network Operations Center

VIP Calling's Network Operations Center (NOC) is the nerve center of The VIP Calling Network. The NOC combines state-of-the-art network management technology with around-the-clock dedicated staff to ensure the highest quality of service to customers worldwide. The NOC relentlessly monitors, tests, and diagnoses all facets of the circuit-switched and packet-switched network environments using the latest network management tools. Tight integration of these tools with the Voice over IP (VoIP) gateways facilitates the generation of real-time call statistics and proactive QoS alarms. Clear and timely reporting to all parties involved ensures prompt resolutions of any network issue. Detailed scenario analysis of historical traffic patterns enables network growth to be carefully coordinated.

"It's easy to deliver low quality IP telephony and even pretty good quality with low volumes of traffic. But we've been able to achieve the much more difficult task of carrying millions of minutes a month to and from multiple destinations around the world, and to provide the real time fax capability that high volume users demand," said Ofer Gneezy, president and CEO, VIP Calling. "The quality requirement in the wholesale carrier market is very high, and if carriers are not completely pleased with the quality of what you are giving them they simply remove you from the routing tables. This is why we continue to develop and invest in Assured Quality Routing."

VIP Calling, Inc., based in Burlington, Mass., is a leading facilities-based carrier utilizing the Internet to provide wholesale international telecommunication services. Founded in 1996, the company has leveraged its engineering and telecommunications expertise to deploy the VIP Calling Network, a state-of-the-art IP telephony network providing PSTN-level quality. The VIP Calling Network has gateway and switching facilities in New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, a Network Operations Center in Burlington, Mass., and high capacity points of presence (POP) worldwide. VIP Calling enables carriers, prepaid card operators and telephony resellers to reduce costs and increase profit margins. The company can be reached at 781-229-0011 or at www.vipcalling.com.