Press Release

BT Exact's Tests Confirm High Performance and Scalability of Data Connection's BGP Software

London, UK: August 8, 2003. Data Connection Limited (DCL), the leading provider of communications protocol software, today announced the successful completion of the rigorous evaluation of DC-BGP, its BGP routing software, by BT Exact, BT's research, technology and IT operations business. DC-BGP forms part of DCL's IP Routing Suite, and has been designed specifically to meet the reliability, scalability and extensibility requirements of today's Internet and Next Generation Networks. DC-BGP also supports advanced features including virtual routing and BGP/MPLS VPNs (RFC 2547).

The full report, which is available on request from DCL, shows that DC-BGP passed all of the tests, and had all the functionality expected. In addition, the report singles out the following results for special mention, as each exceeds the requirements stated in BT Exact's white paper on Core Router Requirements and puts DC-BGP's scalability well beyond current requirements.

• Route table capacity in excess of 1.2 million routes.
• A single peer accepting in excess of 1.2 million unique routes.
• BGP peer capacity in excess of 996 established BGP peers.
• Route convergence and route learning times averaging 7 seconds or under for 100,000 routes.

DC-BGP is a fully portable, source code solution that can be easily integrated with DC-MPLS and DCL's other IP Routing protocol stacks (including DC-OSPF and DC-ISIS), or can be used on its own, or with third-party products. An optional, highly scalable Routing Table Manager component provides a flexible policy engine to control sharing of routing information with other protocols (typically sharing between an IGP and EGP).

DCL's IP Routing suite supports Virtual Routing, with different routing tables for different users. DC-BGP develops this further with a VPN Manager component for providing RFC 2547 BGP/MPLS VPNs. The VPN Manager extends the routing policy rules, for example, providing an intelligent and efficient solution for maintaining private per-VPN routing information alongside shared internet routes.

DC-BGP also supports non-stop forwarding, distribution of routing tables to multiple locations with distributed processing and no single point of failure, and scaling to many thousands of independent routing tables, as required by Virtual Routers and BGP/MPLS VPNs.

"Proven conformance, performance and scalability are critical in the evaluation of routing protocol software," said Dr. Tony Dann, head of IP test and evaluation at BT Exact. "Our testing shows that DC-BGP's performance exceeds the requirements of today's routers, and demonstrates its suitability for next generation devices."

Ben Miller, VP Sales and Marketing, Protocol Software, said: "BT Exact is fast becoming the organization our industry goes to for independent measurement of performance of network protocol software and devices. We are delighted that it has validated the conformance and scalability of DC-BGP under its rigorous test environment."

Further Information

Further information on DC-BGP can be found at www.dataconnection.com/iprouting/bgp.htm.

DC-BGP runs within DCL's existing high performance portable execution environment - the N-BASE. This provides extensive scalability and flexibility and enables the distribution of protocol components across different hardware configurations. The N-BASE has been ported to a large number of operating systems including VxWorks, OSE, pSOS, Chorus, Nucleus, Solaris, HP-UX and Windows NT, and has been used on all common processors including x86, i960, Motorola 860 and 8260, Sparc, IDT and MIPS. Proprietary OSs and chipsets can be supported with minimal effort. In addition, pre-ported solutions are available on a range of operating systems including VxWorks, OSE, Linux, LynxOS, Solaris and Windows.

About BT Exact

BT Exact is BT's research, technology and IT operations business. It specializes in telecommunications engineering, leading-edge network design, IT system and application development and has extensive expertise in business consulting and human factors. Its knowledge helps its customers across BT Group and in selected other businesses gain maximum advantage from their investments in communications networks and IT systems, develop new capabilities and open new opportunities.

BT Exact brings together the technological expertise of BT's research laboratories and the operational experience of the teams that design and operate BT's IT systems. Backed by a team of over 6,000 technologists, it is active and influential in setting global standards.

BT Exact builds on the insights and expertise developed by its research to address the demands of the next-generation internet, as well as advanced data services, information and network security, and software systems to support communications networks worldwide.

BT Exact has people based worldwide - including locations across the UK and in Asia, continental Europe, and North America.

About Data Connection Limited

Data Connection Limited (DCL) is the leading independent developer and supplier of IP Routing, LMP, MPLS, SIP, MGCP/Megaco, SCTP, ATM, Conferencing, Unified Messaging, Directory and SNA portable products. Customers include Calient, CIENA, Cisco, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM Corp., Lucent, Microsoft, Nortel Networks and Sun.

Data Connection is headquartered in London UK, with US offices in Alameda, CA, Dallas, TX and Reston, VA. It was founded in 1981 and is privately held. During each of the past 20 years its profits have exceeded 20% of revenue. Last year sales exceeded $35M, of which 90% were outside the UK, mostly in the US. This large proportion of overseas sales has led to the company being awarded two Queen's Awards for outstanding export performance.

For more information, see www.dataconnection.com.

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Data Connection is a trademark of Data Connection Limited and Data Connection Corporation. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.