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.