LONDON—LignUp Corporation, a leading provider of converged communications solutions, today announced the European launch of FastLign, an industry alliance founded to accelerate the adoption of IP telephony services. Alliance partners provide a fully integrated telephony services architecture, turnkey hosted applications and regional partners to operate and fully support FastLign managed services. TeliaSonera International Carrier and the United Kingdom’s Streamdoor Limited will extend FastLign’s reach into Europe, enabling the market’s numerous emerging service providers to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver hosted telephony services.

“In the past, IP telephony services have been prohibitively time consuming and expensive to build, deploy and manage,” said Johan Andersson, VP and head of Marketing, Strategy and New Busness at TeliaSonera International Carrier. “Service providers must build these services from the ground up, integrating a wide variety of technologies and services to provide a complete services solution. FastLign provides service providers with a hosted telephony services model that removes system integration cycles, provides operations support and allows customers to address the needs of the marketplace.”

Cost-Effective, Managed Services

Streamdoor, a provider of hosted on-demand contact center applications and VoIP communication services, will provide FastLign’s operational backbone and datacenter capacity, managed telephony services support and maintenance and the critical function of providing mediated access to the TeliaSonera International Carrier network. FastLign service providers need not develop organizational competencies in the construction and operation of hosted services. Streamdoor and TeliaSonera will make it possible for FastLign customers to access infrastructure, technical expertise and world-class network capabilities that smaller service providers would ordinarily rarely be able to afford.

Reduced Time to Market, Integration Costs

FastLign’s reference architecture provides essential components for delivering hosted telephony services. Leading industry solutions such as NexTone Communications’ Multiprotocol Session Controller (MSC) are fully integrated and proven interoperable with the LignUp Communications Platform and other FastLign partner solutions. FastLign service providers thereby bypass component evaluation, integration and testing stages of implementation, essentially reducing the time to market for these services.

“Experience teaches us that hosted telephony providers face a number of significant barriers to market entry,” said Jon Keattch, founder and CEO at Streamdoor. “FastLign removes many of the burdens of building and managing these services, while also providing the turnkey applications and development capabilities necessary to speed services to market and compete through innovation and differentiation. We are pleased to join TeliaSonera and LignUp to bring FastLign to Europe.”

Innovate to Differentiate

FastLign’s licensing model brings the best benefits of ownership to a managed services model, allowing providers to fully modify and customize their services to address the specific needs of their customers. FastLign providers can speed their telephony services offerings to market by easily modifying and deploying a variety of turnkey applications from LignUp and other FastLign partners. This provides the capability to deliver an ongoing flow of new hosted services, increasing service competitiveness and avoiding the threat of commoditization.

“Hosted VoIP service providers “must have solutions to the challenges of infrastructure investments, related integration and interoperability struggles, and hosted application development costs,” said Richard Kirk, vice president of LignUp EMEA. “Furthermore, once services are up and running, providers need flexible platforms for developing services that differentiate them in the marketplace. We are proud to work within this field of industry leaders to help next generation service providers speed their offerings to market, and extend the adoption of LignUp’s flexible platform for easy development, enhancement, and differentiation of VoIP services
TeliaSonera will promote the FastLign offering to its global customer base, including its Internet service provider customers. FastLign managed services will become generally available in Europe by June 2006.

For more information on FastLign, please visit www.FastLign.org.

About LignUp Corporation

LignUp Corporation delivers a powerful converged IP communications platform deployed with hosted telephony, voice mail, unified messaging, auto attendant and other Web applications. The 100% software, native-SIP platform is powered by LignUp Call Control XML (CCTRL) and LignUp Media Control XML (MCTRL) and enables solution integrators and service providers to quickly and easily create unique, high margin VoIP applications and services. The proven LignUp Communications Platform is deployed today in over 110 enterprises and 20 service providers around the world and is distributed in Japan by SkyWave and SkyWave partners Hitachi IT, NEC-SI and Net One Systems. LignUp has been named to the Pulver 100 list of leading private VoIP companies, and has been recognized for innovation with the TMC Labs Innovation Award and the EuroStart Channel Excellence Award. LignUp is also a founding member of FastLign, an industry alliance formed to reduce interoperability risks and increase speed to market for VoIP service providers. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, LignUp has offices in Salt Lake City, London and Tokyo. Visit www.LignUp.com for more information.

About Streamdoor Limited

Streamdoor provides IP Contact Centre services on-demand for use by large organizations, medium sized companies and public institutions. Streamdoor’s services enable companies to gain competitive advantage by aligning investment and expenditure in contact centre technology with actual business requirements. The services offer multi-channel connections, via any chosen network and are available on a flexible on-demand usage basis. The company’s data centres are based on Cisco Systems’ IP Communications solutions providing application scalability, resilience and security. Streamdoor’s services are sold through network operators and value added Partners that assist companies in developing solutions and services for their customers. The company has offices in London and New York. Visit www.streamdoor.com for further information.