Ascend Communications

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 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 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 notable of these was Cascade Communications, which Ascend acquired in 1997. 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 Frame Relay and ATM networks throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century.

The complete product suite made Ascend an attractive asset, and was acquired by Lucent Technologies in 1999. The merger was one of the largest mergers in history ($24B USD).

Ascend's stock (traded under the Nasdaq symbol "ASND"), was one of the 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, but like most telecom boom companies, shriveled to a fraction of its original market cap.

On February 1, 2008, Jeanette Symons co- founder of Ascend Communications, piloted a plane that crashed in Augusta, Maine, killing her and her son Balan.

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