Ascend Communications was an

Alameda, California Alameda ( ; ; Spanish for "Avenue (landscape), tree-lined path") is a city in Alameda County, California, located in the East Bay (San Francisco Bay Area), East Bay region of the Bay Area. The city is primarily located on Alameda (island), Alam ...

-based manufacturer of communications equipment that was later purchased by

Lucent Technologies Lucent Technologies, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the divestiture of the former AT&T Technologies business u ...

in 1999. Ascend Communications was founded in 1988 and taken public in 1994. Initial investors included Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers (KPCB);

Greylock Partners Greylock Partners is one of the oldest venture capital firms, founded in 1965, with committed capital of over $3.5 billion under management. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in the consumer, enterprise software and infrastructure as wel ...

; and

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With ~$25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the w ...

(NEA). Ascend Communications designed and manufactured equipment for high-density

dialup Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...

installations, most notably the ''MAX TNT'', which allowed for a DS3 of dialup lines to be terminated in a few rack units. Customers such as

AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017� ...

Earthlink EarthLink is an American Internet service provider. It went public on NASDAQ in January 1997. Much of the company's growth was via acquisition; by 2000, ''The New York Times'' described Earthlink as the "second largest Internet service provider ...

Demon Internet Demon Internet was a British Internet service provider, initially an independent business, later operating as a brand of Vodafone. It was List of UK ISPs by age, one of the UK's earliest ISPs, offering dial-up Internet access services from 1 June ...

, and

UUnet UUNET, founded in 1987, was one of the largest Internet service providers and one of the early Tier 1 networks. It was based in Northern Virginia and was one of the first commercial Internet service providers. Today, UUNET is an internal brand ...

purchased over two million dialup ports worth of ''MAX TNT'' access servers during the dialup days of the 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 Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is a set of communication standards for simultaneous digital transmission of voice, video, data, and other network services over the digitalised circuits of the public switched telephone network. Wo ...

modems and concentrators. Ascend Communications also acquired several companies. In 1996, it acquired NetStar, an Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based publicly traded manufacturer of ultra-high-performance, switched backplane, backbone routers capable 16 Gbit/s throughput. In 1997, Ascend acquired

Cascade Communications Cascade Communications was a Westford, Massachusetts based manufacturer of communications equipment. Founding Cascade was founded by Gururaj Deshpande in 1990, and was led by CEO Dan Smith, VP of Sales Mike Champa and CFO Paul Blondin. Product C ...

. Cascade designed and manufactured high-density carrier packet switches, including the B-STDX9000 frame relay switch and the CBX-500 and GX-550 ATM switches. The B-STDX and CBX/GX lines were the workhorses of most

RBOC The Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOC) are the result of '' United States v. AT&T'', the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust suit against the former American Telephone & Telegraph Company (later known as AT&T Corp.). On January 8, 198 ...

Frame Relay and ATM networks throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century. In August 1998, Ascend bought Stratus Computers for $822 million in stock. ''OCLC not provided due to there being multiple valid values.'' Stratus was primarily a maker of fault-tolerant computer systems but it owned a Service Control Point technology critical to the convergence of voice and data networks that Ascend valued. The server business was sold off to private equity investors within months, following the Lucent deal. It now operates as

Stratus Technologies Stratus Technologies, Inc. is a major producer of fault tolerant computer servers and software. The company was founded in 1980 as Stratus Computer, Inc. in Natick, Massachusetts, and adopted its present name in 1999. The current CEO and preside ...

. The complete product suite made Ascend an attractive asset, and the company was acquired by

in 1999. The $24 billion merger was the largest technology merger in history up to that time. Ascend's stock traded under the Nasdaq symbol ''ASND''.

References

{{reflist 1999 mergers and acquisitions Alcatel-Lucent American companies established in 1988 American companies disestablished in 1999 Companies based in Alameda, California Computer companies established in 1988 Computer companies disestablished in 1999 Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct networking companies Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area