Calient - Press Releases

Atlanta, Ga. June 3, 2002 – Calient Networks, a leading provider of intelligent, photonic switching systems, announces a market leading “pay-as-you-grow” pricing structure for its newly-expanded DiamondWave™ product line, to enable a wide array of photonic switching applications including resilient mesh wavelength services, high bandwidth capacity mining, transparent metro core applications, and selectable levels of wavelength protection switching.

Calient has leveraged its captive technologies, optical packaging innovations and vertical integration of in-house MEMS switch modules to deliver a new price-benefit equation in the photonic switching market. With this vertical integration and high-yield manufacturing, Calient can pass the economic advantages of DiamondWave’s all-optical system architecture to carriers. Carriers can support network growth with modular 8-port upgrades. This minimum cost to acquire and grow photonic switching capacity aligns with the carrier need to turn up services and capacity on an incremental basis. Calient list pricing is $4995 per port before volume discounts, even at low port counts. In contrast, Calient’s competitors offer optical switching systems that are as much as 16 times the price of a DiamondWave system configured to suit the carrier’s application and scale requirements.

“Our competitive advantage in the architecture and economics of optical switching is truly of seismic proportions for this industry,” said Charles Corbalis, president and CEO of Calient Networks. “We have matured our breakthrough MEMS design and fabrication into a high-yield manufacturing process, invented new optical packaging to achieve further cost-reduction and reliability, and developed rapid automated testing equipment. These in-house advances enable our fully-redundant DiamondWave photonic switches to introduce and sustain a new pricing paradigm. Any OEO solution that attempts to deliver hybrid switching (both all-optical and opto-electronic) by integrating third-party optical switch components will find it virtually impossible to match the extremely low loss, low cost, and carrier-class redundancy of the DiamondWave products. Combined with the network-wide intelligence to build flexible mesh networks, Calient has broken the price/performance code for delivering higher speed wavelength services.”

“Calient has raised the bar for its competition, and effectively removed price as a barrier to photonic switch system deployment for carriers,” stated David Krozier, RHK Senior Analyst in Optical Networks. “RHK believes Calient now has the lowest priced photonic switch system. But what is amazing is the DiamondWave systems are now one quarter of the OC-48 per port price of electronic fabric systems now being deployed, and for OC-192 that factor becomes one sixteenth. This demonstrates the economic advantage of switching at the optical layer."

Calient anticipates that many carriers will rely on its newly announced DiamondWave 128 with a 32-port starter configuration in their transparent metro core applications, and the DiamondWave 256 switch at larger sites. For regional and long-haul applications, such as resilient wavelength services and data transport infrastructures, Calient believes that the natural adoption cycle will center on the DiamondWave 256 system at larger sites and the new DiamondWave 128 at smaller sites in a distributed mesh configuration, utilizing GMPLS.

Calient’s flagship DiamondWave 256 is currently in extensive application trials with IXCs, ILECs and PTTs worldwide, and has been in pre-deployment trials with initial users at Japan Telecom.

About Calient Networks
Calient Networks is a leading provider of intelligent, photonic switching systems and software that help service providers scale their networks for explosive bandwidth demands and deliver new wavelength services. Calient’s DiamondWave™ switching system and GMPLS-powered networking innovations provide a seamless, ‘opto-electronic-to-photonic’ migration path that is non-disruptive to legacy operations, highly cost-effective, and an enabler to revenue-generating optical services. Calient is shipping its DiamondWave 256 and 128 systems to carrier networks worldwide. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California. Additional engineering and manufacturing operations are located in Santa Barbara, California, while MEMS design and fabrication operations are located in Ithaca, New York. For additional information about Calient, visit www.calient.net.

Calient Networks, the Calient Networks logo, and DiamondWave are trademarks of Calient Networks, Inc.