NetSpeak's iTEL platform to be demonstrated at pulver.com's Fall 2000 Voice on the Net (VON), Booths 206 & 208

ATLANTA - September 12, 2000 - NetSpeak. Corporation (NASDAQ: NSPK), a leading provider of advanced telephony solutions for Internet Protocol (IP) networks, today unveiled the latest enhancement to its leading iTEL platform: the Interconnect Gatekeeper. NetSpeak's Interconnect Gatekeeper enables Voice over IP (VoIP) carriers to overcome the next big industry challenge: scaling their VoIP networks to capture voice revenue from today's legacy telecom networks - which still carry more than 99.9 percent of today's voice and fax traffic.

The first carriers to experience the benefits of the new NetSpeak Interconnect Gatekeeper are the company's most recent customers, Genuity and China Unicom. Genuity is using NetSpeak's Interconnect Gatekeeper to increase its network capacity, while China Unicom will benefit from the scalability and flexibility to easily expand its NetSpeak-powered Voice VPN application to any city within its 311-city nationwide network.

Today's VoIP networks are growing extremely quickly, thanks to the lower costs and enhanced services they offer subscribers. However, in order to fully leverage these competitive advantages and thus capture more traffic from today's legacy networks, VoIP networks must expand their geographic reach and increase the call volumes they can support. Unfortunately, today's peer-to-peer based VoIP architectures simply don't scale effectively, making it difficult for carriers to manage higher call volumes and add new points of presence (POPs), particularly when interconnecting with other service providers.

Part of Release 3.0 of NetSpeak's iTEL platform, the NetSpeak Interconnect Gatekeeper solves this problem by enabling voice over IP carriers to effectively add new POPs and better manage their VoIP networks. Using the Interconnect Gatekeeper, operators can now expand their geographic reach by easily interconnecting to termination partners across the globe. Also, by taking full advantage of features such as centralized route policy management, the carriers are able to easily manage the higher call volumes created by this interconnection. Release 3.0 also includes support for 800 services, mixed-mode domain support and support for third-party gatekeepers, all features that allow service providers to more easily expand and manage their networks.

"While the VoIP marketplace is exploding, today's VoIP networks still carry only 2.6 billion minutes. This compares to the estimated 6.25 trillion voice and fax minutes carried by today's legacy networks," said Jim Kwock, vice president of marketing at NetSpeak. "This means that today's VoIP networks carry less than one-tenth of one percent of total global voice and fax traffic.

"To realize their full potential, VoIP networks must expand both their network capacity and their geographic reach to capture a greater percentage of the total telecom voice pie," Kwock continued. "That's why more and more carriers are turning to NetSpeak to help them manage their larger networks and to interconnect with termination partners that have POPs in other geographies."

How it Works

Put simply, the NetSpeak Interconnect Gatekeeper allows carriers to connect into multiple domains. This benefits carriers by allowing them to easily and more securely connect with termination partners around the globe as well as to partition their own network based on, for instance, the location of their Network Operation Centers (NOCs).

For example, using the Interconnect Gatekeeper, carriers can quickly and securely connect their Cisco-based networks with other large-scale VoIP networks through one single point of entry without having to share the details of their network with their termination partners. Prior to the existence of the Interconnect Gatekeeper, every time one carrier added a new gateway, its termination partners had to configure their own networks to support this new gateway. With the addition of the Interconnect Gatekeeper, this expensive and time-consuming process is no longer necessary, and network upgrades can be made without affecting a termination partner's network.

The ability to partition network traffic into multiple domains controlled by a centralized network management system will enable carriers to more efficiently route traffic. For instance, a global carrier can now provision new customers in three different domains, such as one in China, one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. Using the Interconnect Gatekeeper, a different NOC supports each domain, thus preventing unnecessary traffic from passing through each and every domain. This arrangement makes management of the network easier and more cost-effective, enabling the carrier to take full advantage of the IP-based distributed architecture model by routing traffic in the most efficient manner.

Carrier-scale VoIP Solutions Powered by NetSpeak's iTEL Architecture

NetSpeak's scalable, open and standards-compliant iTEL architecture provides the software platform to manage and maintain global VoIP networks. The award-winning iTEL platform includes NetSpeak's Infrastructure Gatekeeper, its Interconnect Gatekeeper and its Route Server, which together provide carriers with the unmatched ability to partition network traffic and management and thus more easily support carrier-scale networks while supporting multiple enhanced applications. The iTEL architecture can process more than 100 calls per second, offering 10 times the performance of alternative systems.

Availability

NetSpeak's newly enhanced iTEL platform (Release 3.0), which includes NetSpeak's Infrastructure Gatekeeper, new Interconnect Gatekeeper and Route Server is now available. For more information, visit www.netspeak.com.