Press Release

Sewickley, PA, March 12, 2001—Laurel Networks, a start-up company developing routing systems for the network edge and Agilent Technologies (NYSE: A), a leading provider of innovative technologies for electronics, communications, and life sciences, today announced a partnership to promote industry-standard testing specifications for MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching). The Laurel-Agilent alliance will advance the use of MPLS throughout the network by ensuring interoperability across a spectrum of vendor products.

"The next-generation IP network relies on MPLS to enable any type of traffic to be routed transparently and efficiently. Standards for MPLS testing are critical to ensure service providers can use a multi-vendor network to offer their enterprise customers high-quality, scalable services by supporting features such as QoS guarantees on services and VPN support," said Gerald DeGrace, Laurel Networks Vice President of Product Engineering. When deployed in an IP network, MPLS attaches labels to IP packets that can be used by edge routers to quickly determine the destination address for the packet and any special treatment to be applied to the traffic."

"We're very pleased to have this opportunity to team with Laurel Networks on this important effort," said Ananda Sen Gupta, Product Manager at Agilent and Vice-Chair for the Interoperability Work Group. "The combined experience of Laurel Networks and Agilent Technologies will help deliver to service providers the assurance of interoperability of MPLS vendor products before they're added to their networks."

The companies are defining a suite of testing specifications that will validate conformance to MPLS standards and interoperability agreements. The specifications were proposed for adoption by the MPLS Forum Interoperability Committee at its members meeting in New Orleans, March 7th and 8th. The specifications included tests for the Label Distribution Protocol (LDP), the underlying mechanism for distribution labels between routers. A future proposal will include Traffic Engineering extensions to the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP), a protocol that allows routers and MPLS switches to establish Label Switched Paths(LSPs) with bandwidth reservations.

"We are pleased to welcome all technical contributions from our member companies in the important area of MPLS interoperability testing. Furthering MPLS interoperability testing is one of the Forum's primary purposes, and this contribution from Laurel and Agilent will help us reach this goal," said Andrew Malis, Chair of the Technical Committee and Vice President of Technology for the MPLS Forum.

About Agilent Technologies
Agilent technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) is a global technology leader in communications, electronics, life sciences and healthcare. With 48,000 employees serving customers in more than 120 countries, Agilent had net revenue of $10.8 billion in fiscal year 2000. Information about Agilent can be found on the Web at www.agilent.com.

About Laurel Networks
Laurel Networks is developing high capacity edge routers- routers designed and developed specifically for the edge of an IP/MPLS network- to enable the creation and delivery of premium services across an MPLS core. Laurel's solution is the first on the market to combine the performance and traffic management required to guarantee service delivery at optical speeds with the routing intelligence necessary to map services onto an IP/MPLS backbone. Laurel, founded in 1999, is headquartered in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh. For more information about Laurel, visit www.laurelnetworks.com.

About The MPLS Forum
The MPLS Forum is an industry-wide association of leading networking and telecommunications companies focused on advancing the successful deployment of multi-vendor MPLS networks and associated applications. The Forum will achieve this through interoperability initiatives, implementation agreements, and educational programs. For more information about The MPLS Forum, please contact Alexa Morris, MPLS Forum Executive Director, at (510) 608-5914 or via e-mail at: amorris@mplsforum.org. Additional informational regarding Forum membership and the Forum's mission is available online at www.mplsforum.org/.