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PARIS, France - October 21, 1997 - Cisco Systems, Inc. today announced the first phase of a data/voice/video integration strategy that will ultimately encompass all aspects of enterprise and service provider infrastructures. Aimed at enterprise wide-area networking, today's announcement includes a systems and technology strategy, new products and future product directions. With these new capabilities, Cisco's enterprise customers can integrate their wide-area voice and data communications for cost savings, increased performance and seamless communications management.

The strategy includes details of how Cisco can help users network and interoperate voice over Frame Relay, voice over ATM and voice over IP from smaller access locations to larger backbone sites and across private leased and public service infrastructures.

"With voice over ATM and voice over Frame Relay becoming mainstream, Cisco now has the solution that takes advantage of these technologies without forcing users to build separate networks," said John P. Morency, director of the Network Industry Practice for The Registry, Inc. "Given its large market share in both the Internet and enterprise backbones, Cisco is well positioned to effectively create a very broad market for voice over IP in a very short time."

New products announced today include voice modules for the Cisco 3600 series and ATM circuit emulation capabilities for the Catalyst. 5500 series. The voice modules for the widely deployed Cisco 3600 family provide four analog voice ports each, up to three modules per system for 12 ports total. The voice modules support 64-kbps PCM and 8-kbps CS-ACELP compression for each channel, including fax demodulation, voice activity detection and echo cancellation. Voice switching is supported through channel associated-signaling and DTMF dialed digit detection.

The circuit emulation module for the Catalyst 5500 family complements the circuit emulation capabilities on the LightStream 1010. ATM switch and Cisco 7200 series routers, supporting up to four structured T1/T3 or E1/E3 circuits over a T3/E3 or OC-3 trunk into an ATM network. Circuit emulation allows legacy systems not supporting IP, Frame Relay or ATM protocols, such as PBXs and legacy TDM systems, to be transported over emerging broadband ATM infrastructures.

"Cisco customers have asked us to enable data/voice/video integration within their network architectures to preserve their investments, save money and enable new applications," said Peter Alexander, director of marketing for Cisco's Multiservice Access business unit. "With these capabilities we can add voice and video to real-world mixed ATM, Frame Relay and IP network infrastructures at minimum cost and network impact. Cisco's multiservice networks offer the most flexible architecture available, enabling IT applications to be responsive to business requirements."

Cisco plans to announce further components of its overall data/voice/video integration strategy over the next three calendar quarters.

Systems and Technology Strategy

Cisco's strategy is built upon ATM and IP in the network core with Tag Switching providing integration, scalability and performance across both technologies in seamless networks. (Cisco demonstrated voice over a Tag-Switched IP/ATM network at Telecom Geneva in September and at Networld+Interop in Atlanta earlier this month.) At the network edge, voice is optionally compressed and then adapted from its native PCM into standard IP or Frame Relay packets or ATM cells. It is then transported across Cisco's wide variety of user-to-network technologies into the backbone infrastructure. A Cisco backbone is not required, but will yield more consistent voice quality because of the advanced quality of service (QoS) and traffic management capabilities within Cisco backbone systems.

Cisco's technology strategy for data/voice/video integration is to use only standards-based implementations where available, and standards-proposed implementations where the standards are under development. Key standards implemented and under development are:

• G.729 - CS-ACELP voice compression @ 8 kbps per channel
• FRF 11/12 - Voice over Frame Relay, call setup, segmentation
• RFC 1483 - Multiprotocol over ATM
• RFC 1490 - Multiprotocol over Frame Relay
• RSVP (IETF Draft)- QoS over IP for data flows
• G.723.1 - Interoperable voice-over-IP audio codes
• H.323 - Interoperable audio and videoconferencing over IP
• AF-SAA-0032 - ATM Forum Circuit Emulation Service Interoperability

Other strategic technologies implemented by Cisco are voice over IP, in which Cisco is taking an active role toward standardization, and voice activity detection (VAD), a technique for reducing voice bandwidth by halting traffic generation during silence. Cisco is also taking a leadership role in the development of standards and ultimate implementation of full QoS capabilities over IP, which would then be introduced as a software upgrade to most Cisco systems.

Cisco Offers Complete Portfolio for Integration of Data/Voice/Video

Cisco recently introduced additional new products and capabilities to address the need for integrating data/voice/video traffic on customer networks. Designed for regional and branch office locations, the Cisco 3800 access concentrator is a multiservice Frame Relay and ATM integrated access solution in a single platform. Announced earlier this year, LightStream 1010. ATM switches and the Cisco 7200 series support T1/E1 circuit emulation modules. These new cards concentrate multiple circuit emulation streams onto a single broadband link for transport across an ATM network. The Cisco StrataCom. IGX also supports efficient, high-quality voice connectivity to digital PABX through standard interfaces. This platform supports voice compression, voice activity detection, standard voice switching, fax and modem services and voice service modules. Circuit-switched data services on the Cisco IGX include transparent data service, flexible clocking and repetitive pattern suppression-circuit data compression.

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. at http://www.cisco.com.

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