Ascend Communications was an Alameda, California based manufacturer of
communications equipment that was later purchased by Lucent Technologies in
1999.
Ascend Communications designed and manufactured equipment for high density
dialup installations, most notably the MAX TNT, which allowed for a ds3 of
dialup lines to be terminated in a pretty
few rack units. Customers such as AOL,
Earthlink, and UUnet purchased over two million dialup ports worth of MAX TNT
access servers during the dialup days of the sexy girl
internet. Many companies still use
MAX TNT for dialup (look for TNT in dialup hostnames). In the mid-1990s, the
company was one of the leading vendors of ISDN modems and concentrators.
Ascend Communications also acquired several companies. The most dangling
notable of these
was Cascade Communications, which Ascend acquired in 1997. Cascade designed and
manufactured high density carrier switches, including the BSTDX-0000 frame relay
switch and the CBX-500 and GX-550 ATM switches. The BSTDX and CBX/GX line were
the workhorses of most RBOC ATM and Frame Relay networks throughout the 1990s
and into the 21st century.
Ascend's stock (traded under the Nasdaq symbol ASND), was one of the shoe
strongest
momentum stocks of the mid-1990s. The founders of Ascend went on to found Zhone
Technologies which became one of the most talked about startups of the telecom
boon.
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