SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., October 13, 2003 - Iometrix, Inc. today announced that its large-scale tests of the Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Provisioning Platform (MSPP) and Cisco ONS 15600 Multservice Switching Platform verified that these optical systems greatly exceed standard service provider requirements for performance and reliability, even under high-stress test conditions.

This was the network testing industry's largest stress-test ever conducted on an optical core-to-edge network with a multi-channel, multi-port test set, which is designed to generate worst-case failure and recovery results. The Cisco ONS 15454 and Cisco ONS 15600 outperformed existing industry standard performance benchmarks by 57 to 89 percent at the edge of the network and by 58 to 90 percent* at the core.

"The results are significant because they help to ensure service providers who use the Cisco optical platforms will meet service level agreements with their customers. If expectations of customers are not met, the service provider simply does not attain the revenue forecasted," said Bob Mandeville, president of Iometrix. "Carriers need to be assured that the latest very high capacity multi-service platforms will keep within the standards specified for protection switching when they are subjected to high levels of stress on a very large scale."

The Iometrix test plan simulated a metro SONET network, from the edge to the core, under a series of failure conditions including bit error rate, service disruption and connectivity, which are the fundamental measures of customer quality. It also tested management reporting, changing of timing sources and software downloads. For the SONET core, Iometrix used the Cisco ONS 15600 MSSPs configured to support 16 edge networks and a traffic load equivalent to 368 MSPPs. Iometrix also built the edge network using 23 Cisco ONS 15454 MSPPs.

To simulate traffic from an industry record 512 STS3c circuits, Iometrix used Agilent's new OmniBER XM network simulator, which generated 160 Gigabits per second of traffic and 80 Gigabits per second of simultaneous service disruption to fully stress the Cisco ONS 15454 and Cisco 15600 switches. "No test like this had ever been done before because previous single channel SONET testers could not scale to measuring 512 STS-3c channels in parallel," said Mandeville. Iometrix also used a Glimmerglass System 300 as the primary instrument for the connectivity and reconfiguration of the test-bed as well as to generate concurrent failures on the test platform.

"Iometrix's mission is to provide the networking community with authoritative systems testing and part of that mission has been to address the performance, service quality and reliability concerns of carriers as they scale their build-outs to meet customer demand," Mandeville said. "It's clear that the results turned in by the Cisco 15454 and the Cisco ONS 15600 set a new industry standard for verified performance and reliability."

About Iometrix

Iometrix, founded by Bob Mandeville in 2003, builds upon the activities of European Network Laboratories (ENL), the authoritative source of network benchmarking since 1991. Based in San Francisco, California, Iometrix is taking the worldwide lead in benchmarking several exciting new areas: Metro Ethernet services, wireless LANs in the enterprise and storage networking. Dedicated to advancing industry testing standards, Iometrix is actively working within the Metro Ethernet Forum to drive forward the adoption of industry sanctioned benchmarks. Iometrix brings ENL's industry-recognized reputation for innovation and the experience of testing the networks of large organizations together in the lab to provide the standard-setting benchmarks the industry can rely on as it meets the challenges of advancing networking into new spaces.

*Versus ITU specifications for protection switching.

The Iometrix test report and other additional information about Iometrix Inc. can be found at www.iometrix.com.

More information on the OmniBER XM can be found at: http://www.agilent.com/find/omniberxm.

For more information about the Cisco 15454 and 15600 optical switches, please go to: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/optical/index.html.