Nokia Acquires Diamond Lane Communications

Telecommunications equipment vendor Nokia signed a definitive agreement to acquire Diamond Lane Communications Corp. for about $125 million in cash. The Petaluma, CA-based company has developed and offered commercially the SpeedLink system, a digital subscriber line access multiplexer based on the asynchronous transfer mode protocol coupled with customer premises equipment.

Diamond Lane has pursued a strategy of offering a variety of xDSL capabilities to its customers. Working with four CPE partners, the vendor can offer all of the xDSL line code technologies. For example, Diamond Lane offers ADSL with both carrierless amplitude/phase and discrete multitone line codes, as well as the 2B1Q-based symmetric DSL (SDSL) and ISDN DSL (IDSL).

The vendor's largest customer to date in terms of number of modems sold is Santa Clara, CA-based Covad Communications. Calling itself a packet-based competitive local exchange carrier, Covad provides xDSL communication services to Internet service providers and enterprise customers. It has launched services in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Washington D.C., and Seattle metropolitan areas.

Nokia has been an investor in Diamond Lane since 1997. With final approvals, expected in 30 days, Diamond Lane will become Nokia's new high speed access products division. The two companies already have successfully integrated Diamond Lane's products in an end-to-end Fast Internet solution that addresses service provider needs including service and network management and billing.