March 25, 2003--EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering Inc. announced today that it has received a $1.6-million order from a prominent Tier-1 network service provider (NSP) for predominantly protocol-layer test equipment.

The NSP purchased 2.5-Gbit/sec and 10-Gbit/sec SONET/SDH testers, Optical Time Domain Reflectometers (OTDRs), which are contained inside EXFO's FTB-400 field-testing platform, and optical loss test sets to ensure the integrity of its high-speed optical networks.

"This latest sale demonstrates that we're increasingly getting a foothold in the protocol-layer test market less than two years after our first acquisition in this space," contends Germain Lamonde, chairman, president and chief executive officer of EXFO. "We also have received a number of product approvals from major accounts due to the benefits of having protocol-, optical- and physical-layer test solutions housed in the same PC-centric, Windows-driven platform. This value-added solution not only allows field technicians to carry several test modules inside a single box, but it also provides them with a common graphical user interface to simplify training, lower costs and increase productivity," he adds.

EXFO claims to be the first fiber-optic test and measurement vendor to fully integrate protocol-, optical- and physical-layer testing capabilities inside a single platform. For more information, visit EXFO's Web site at www.exfo.com.