[Diamond Lane]
Andy --
Here's the Diamond Lane homepage.
dlcc.com
You'll notice Drs. Hawley and Stephens both have histories with DSC and Optilink, as does Jim Steenbergen, Amati's CEO.
History of Diamond Lane:
In 1995 George Hawley and Chet Stephens retired as executives from
DSC Communications in Petaluma, California. "We had picked out
the park bench where we were going to feed the pigeons," recalls
Stephens. Soon after, he and Stephens discovered the Internet and "retirement" became furthest from their minds.
Hawley, known in telecommunications circles as "Dr. Loop" for his
pioneering work in digital loop systems at Bell Labs, and Stephens, a top-notch salesman in the industry, had become friends while helping
to build Optilink Corp. It was sold to DSC in 1990, after which the
two remained at DSC, continuing to plan and sell versions of the Litespan optical loop carrier system, developed at Optilink. By 1995 they had accomplished their goals at DSC and decided it might be a
good time to think about retirement.
But the Internet beckoned. "I set up a little consulting office in my
home and was advised to get on the Internet. Then I saw the World Wide Web and asked 'where have I been?" says Hawley.
"I had been sheltered by corporate networks," Hawley says, "and
never had a taste of the Web." He was dazzled by the sheer enormity
of information - in written and graphic form - that became available to him, sitting in his Petaluma ranch home. But "the Internet was broke," says Hawley, and "I knew how to fix it."
What was broken was the excruciating length of time it took to
download graphics off the Internet. "People are using dial-up modems
to interconnect to the Internet. As a result, they are fundamentally constrained by the voice frequency spectrum normally used for
telephone calls." Hawley explains.
Product Concept
Hawley's original concept was to enable Internet users to share the
phone lines in their homes or offices with a high speed data signal,
then, with a "splitter," to split the data from the voice and catapult the data "into a whole new network."
The network of choice, according to Hawley, is ATM (Asynchronous
Transfer Mode) which allows data, voice and video signals to travel
together, using fixed packet lengths with assigned priority. By
organizing the data in a way that each packet is uniformly sized, a data communications network can be organized to be responsive to both delay tolerant data messages and delay sensitive voice and video
communications.
"The Internet user is no longer limited by the voice network. This
allows us to exploit the capacity of the wires themselves. The only
limitation now is the physics of twisted pairs in the telephone loop,"
explains Hawley.
By being free of traditional voice network constraints, and by using the significantly more efficient ATM transmission method, Hawley's
concept could deliver a prime need of Internet users - speed - while
supporting in the future, efficient new voice and video communications.
Genesis
Diamond Lane Communications' first product, the Hitchhiker system,
was a "goofy" idea.
"Chet and I had begun our respective retirements, and we were with
our wives at Disneyland in the spring of 1995. We grabbed some
lunch at the Goofy restaurant and I sketched out the idea for the
system on a Goofy placemat," recalls Hawley.
Patent attorneys now have the placemat securely tucked away in a file.
After Disneyland, Hawley and Stephens did some intelligence
gathering and discovered no one had a similar product out in the
marketplace. Having forged a strong relationship while working
together at Optilink, and then DSC, they decided to end their
short-lived retirement, merge their considerable engineering and sales
expertise and found Diamond Lane Communications Corporation.
Hawley named his concept the Hitchhiker system to denote the ADSL
data signal "hitchhiking" on existing phone wires.
The name "Diamond Lane" was suggested by Steve Dow, an executive with the Palo Alto, California office of Sevin Rosen, a preeminent venture capital firm and one of the company's original funding sources. Diamond lanes are widely used on freeways to mark carpool lanes which usually move at higher speeds than adjacent one-passenger vehicle lanes.
Sevin Rosen was joined in the first round of funding in 1995 by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers and Crosspoint Venture
Partners. Oak Investment Partners participated in the August, 1996
second funding round.
Diamond Lane celebrated its first anniversary in June, 1996. It is a development stage company, having completed its second round of
venture capital financing. The company's first high speed Internet
access system, the Hitchhiker system, will be available in the
commercial marketplace in mid 1997. >>>
Products:
dlcc.com |
