Alameda, California-based Ascend Communications Inc has – literally – bought into the concept of the Internet Protocol switch, by agreeing to pay around $300m in shares to acquire NetStar Inc (CI No 2,925). NetStar is developing an Internet Protocol switch which is based on fundamentally the same principles as that of Ipsilon Networks Inc (CI No 2,923), although it will be pitched at a different market. It claims that NetStar’s Giga-Router has redundancy and other associated features that make it suitable for Internet service providers, while Ipsilon is pitching its own switch at corporate customers. Ascend believes that through the acquisition, it will be able to offer the final piece of the puzzle for Internet service providers. The co mpany has its own remote access kit, acquired with the takeover of the remote access business unit of Dayna Communications Corp; central site wide area network access switches in the form of its MAX family (CI No 2,750); and with the addition of the GigaRouter Internet Protocol switch, it will now have a high-performance product to provide Internet service providers with central-site switching and routing – the company is claiming performance of over 2 million packets per second, compared with the 300,000pps to 500,000pps of traditional routers. The product is claimed to give the performance increases of alternatives such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode and Frame Relay, without the associated increases in cost, although it has yet to back up this claim with any specific pricing. Native Frame Relay The GigaRouter is based on a 16Gb non-blocking crossbar switch, which is claimed to connect any combination of high-speed central-site interfaces including Asynchronous Mode OC-3 and OC-12; FDDI; Frame Relay; High Performance Parallel Interface and Fast Ethernet. Ascend plans to make some modifications to the initial product, including embedding its network operating system within the product, to provide native Frame Relay switching within it and to provide bandwidth-on-demand capabilities. In terms of a timescale for these capabilities, Mory Ejabat, president and chief executive of Ascend said We haven’t sat down and detailed schedules, but our hope is to have it by the end of the year. NetStar will remain in its Eden Prairie, Minneso ta headquarters and will operate as Ascend’s High Speed Networking Business Unit. NetStar’s president and chief executive Douglas Pihl will stay on as vice-president and general manager of the unit. Under the terms of the deal, for each share of Net Star, holders are to get 0.35398 of an Ascend share.
