US: Catapult Communications announced a new m5000 hardware platform that addresses the telecom industry's need for higher load test performance.

Designed especially for 3G/ATM load test applications, the new platform is a significant performance upgrade for both the DCT2000 and the MGTS i3000 digital communication test systems.

As the beginning of a next generation family of high-performance products, the m5000 is based on industry standard CompactPCI specifications. A serial mesh backplane architecture supports up to 18 interface cards and provides the advantages of scalability, data traffic management and computing resource flexibility. A new Catapult-designed m5000-OC3/12 computing interface card is also being introduced. This new interface card employs two IBM 750FX PowerPC RISC processors to provide high capacity computing power. At introduction, the m5000 platform and OC3/12 computing interface card are supported on the DCT2000 test system and are available for immediate shipment.

According to Dave Mayfield, Catapult President and COO, "The m5000 platform demonstrates Catapult's commitment to developing test systems that meet next generation network performance requirements. As we move forward, it is important that previous customer investments in the DCT2000 and MGTS i3000 test systems are preserved. We are protecting those investments in two ways.

First, the new m5000 platform can easily be added to existing system configurations and second, previously purchased protocols and customer-developed test scripts do not have to be modified to run on the m5000."