Caerus Appoints Ron Harden E.V.P. of Sales & Marketing

Ron Harden has joined Caerus as E.V.P. of sales and marketing. He joins Caerus, Inc. from broadband service provider Grande Communications. Prior to that, he was a director and chief operating officer at PointOne Telecommunications, a network provider that offered VoIP and data services to wholesale and enterprise markets. Harden previously worked with three other prominent telecom organizations: Williams Communications, where he served as vice president of sales and marketing, WorldCom Inc., and the original WilTel, where he had varied executive management responsibilities in sales and marketing for both wholesale and retail channels. He has also previously served as chairman of the CompTel/Ascent Alliance board.



Volo Communications is a next gen service provider that offers voice, data and enhanced services to carrier customers including, tier 1 and 2 carriers, CLECs, ISPs, cable providers, resellers and IXCs, utilizing both TDM and Packet Technology. Volo Communications is a wholly owned subsidiary of Caerus. http://www.volocommunications.com

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World Wide Packets Closes Additional $8.7 Million in Funding

World Wide Packets, a start-up based in Spokane, Washington announced a second close to its current round of funding, bringing the total new investment to approximately $24.5 million. Earlier this year, the company raised $15.7 million in the first closing of its third round of funding for its Ethernet-based last mile access solutions. New investors Argo Global Capital and Entrepedia Ventures participated in the oversubscribed second close of $8.7 million.



World Wide Packets features a Layer 2 Ethernet-to-the-Subscriber architecture that runs over either copper or active fiber connections. The company's product line spans central office aggregation boxes, neighborhood concentrators and customer premise equipment, supporting IP voice, video and data services. World Wide Packets also provides a network management system with extensive provisioning capabilities. Because it leverages a Layer 2 Ethernet network architecture, the company said its network architecture more easily accommodates wholesale service models whereby multiple ISPs, voice carriers or video providers share the same network. http://www.worldwidepackets.com

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Aperto Raises $20 Million for WiMax Solutions

Aperto Networks, a start-up based in Milpitas, California raised $20 million in Series D financing for its WiMAX-class broadband wireless access systems. Aperto supplies a family of base stations, subscriber units, and associated radios and antennas in 2.5, 3.5 and 5 GHz frequency bands for global point-to-point and point-to-multipoint deployments. The new funding will be used to expand the company's sales initiatives, further develop its technology portfolio to complete certification of 802.16/WiMAX-compliant products, and increase support for its existing customer based. Aperto claims over 120 service providers in over 40 countries. The new funding was led by JK&B Capital and included participation from Aperto's key existing investors including Canaan Partners, Alliance Ventures, Innovacom, Tyco Ventures, Labrador Ventures, and Satwik Ventures. Aperto has now raised $77 million in financial backing to date.



Aperto Networks is a founder and leading contributor to IEEE 802.16a/d as well as to ETSI-BRAN standards, and a board member of the WiMAX Forumhttp:///www.apertonet.com

• In November 2003, Aperto Networks signed an agreement with Intel to develop equipment built with Intel's IEEE 802.16 compliant silicon scheduled for introduction in the second half of 2004.

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Mangrove Systems Hires Two Key Executives

Mangrove Systems, a start-up based in Wallingford, Conn., named John Gamelin as Vice President of Technology, and Paul Doolan as Vice President of Network Architecture. Gamelin previously served as co-founder and later, Vice President of Engineering with Tellium. Before that, he was a senior scientist at Bellcore. Doolan is credited with early development work in MPLS, including work on Cisco's Tag Distribution Protocol (TDP). For two years he led the Item's Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) work and was a founding member of the MPLS Forum. Doolan previously served with Cisco Systems, DEC, Ascom Nexion and most recently, Ennovate Networks as Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President.



Mangrove Systems is developing a line of "Multiservice GFP Switching platforms that will bridge the divide between today's TDM-based metro networks and the packet-centric networks of the future."http://www.mangrovesystems.com

• In April 2003, Mangrove Systems secured over $20 million in financing for its development of a GFP-based Transport Aware Switching system. GFP (generic framing procedure) is a method of supporting a wide range of service types and protocols (TDM, Ethernet, ATM and storage transport) over embedded SONET infrastructure.



• Mangrove Systems was founded in mid-2002. The company is headed by Jonathan Reeves, who formerly founded and served as Chairman and CEO of Sahara Networks (acquired by Cascade and then Ascend), and who also founded Sirocco Systems (acquired by Sycamore Networks).

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Circuit City to Offer Vonage IP Phones

Circuit City will begin offering adapters for Vonage's IP broadband phone service in its 600 stores across the U.S. Consumers with broadband connections can sign up for Vonage service and purchase a Vonage starter kit from Circuit City for $99.99. The offer includes activation and two months of the Vonage service.



Vonage continues to add more than 15,000 lines per month to its network. http://www.vonage.com

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Alcatel Selected for DSL in United Arab Emirates

Etisalat, the United Arab Emirates' incumbent telecommunications operator, selected Alcatel for its nationwide DSL deployment. Etisalat will use the Alcatel 7300 Advanced Services Access Manager (ASAM) DSL access network solution together with full end-to-end Network service management capabilities. Financial terms were not disclosed. http://www.alcatel.com

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Brazil's Telemar Signs New Outsourcing Deal with Siemens

Brazil's Telemar awarded a two year contract to Siemens Information and Communication Networks (ICN) division to manage its internal network in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Esp�rito Santo, where the carrier has larger volumes of traffic and subscribers. In addition to the maintenance services provided by Siemens to Telemar since 2001 for local exchanges, as well as the transmission system and accompanying infrastructure, the company is now taking over the maintenance of the carrier's large, traffic-intensive exchanges, gateways, optical backbone and satellite networks, WLL networks, and the entire power and air-conditioning infrastructure. Financial terms were not disclosed.



Telemar serves nearly 17.5 million telephone lines connected to 4,300 main voice exchanges and has 180,000 data transport ports online. http://www.siemens.com/networks/

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AT&T and Microsoft Settle Voice Patent Claim

Microsoft agreed to settle a patent dispute with AT&T concerning technology for the transmission of voice over an IP network. AT&T alleged that its technology was being used in Microsoft's NetMeeting and TrueSpeech products. Under the deal, Microsoft has made a payment to AT&T and the parties agreed to appeal a single issue to the Federal Circuit, with another payment contingent on the outcome of the appeal. http://www.att.comhttp://www.microsoft.com

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Level 3 to Terminate Vendor Agreement With Allegiance Telecom

Level 3 Communications reached an agreement to terminate a multi-year contract under which it has to purchase wholesale dial access services, including the use of operating equipment, from Allegiance Telecom. Level 3 assumed the contract with Allegiance as part of its acquisition of Genuity's assets last year. To settle the contract, Level 3 has agreed to pay Allegiance $54 million in cash. The company has approximately $200 million of outstanding debt in the form of capital lease obligations that will be eliminated as a result of the settlement. The deal requires the approval of the bankruptcy court that is overseeing the Allegiance case. http://www.level3.com

• In February 2004, XO Communications won a bankruptcy court auction to acquire the assets of Allegiance Telecom and its subsidiaries except for Allegiance's customer premise equipment sales and maintenance business, its managed modem business and certain other Allegiance assets and operations. The wining bid was for approximately $311 million in cash and approximately 45.38 million shares of XO common stock. XO said the acquisition would make it the nation's largest national local telecommunications services provider, with approximately 330,000 customers and more than $1.6 billion in revenue. The company will have the largest network of nationwide connections to regional Bell operating companies' networks of any other CLEC, and double the PoPs within the 36 markets where both XO and Allegiance operate.

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