Metalink Offers WLANPlus

YAKUM, Israel -- Metalink (Nasdaq: MTLK), a leading provider of high performance wireline broadband chipsets, today unveiled its strategic plan to expand the company's product offering to include innovative products serving the wireless LAN market. The company announced that it is developing a wireless LAN technology, WLANPlus(TM), capable of increasing the speed more than five fold in comparison to the currently available wireless LAN 802.11x technology. Metalink will demonstrate its WLANPlus technology to potential alpha customers in the fourth quarter of this year.

Metalink's WLANPlus is designed to meet the ever-increasing demand for wireless LAN speed and reach, critical for home and office multi-media applications. WLANPlus' architecture features multiple antennas and utilizes advanced communication techniques such as space-time coding, in order to dramatically improve speed and reach. The technology is designed to be backward compatible with the currently available 802.11x standards and supports recent improvements in QoS (Quality of Service) and security. WLANPlus chipsets are designed to be price-competitive with currently available 802.11x chipsets.

"The concept of sending data, video and audio content wirelessly seems to be the near-term future of networking information and distributed computing," predicts Vamsi Sistla, Allied Business Intelligence (ABI) Senior Analyst. "Worldwide revenues of WiFi and other wireless chipset shipments for A/V applications will reach anywhere between $170 million to $290 million in the year 2004 and beyond," according to ABI.

"Metalink has been developing its WLANPlus technology over the last 18 months, as a part of our strategic effort to expand our VDSL leadership to synergetic, rapidly-growing, broadband markets," said Mr. Tzvi Shukhman, Metalink's Chairman and CEO. "We are excited to participate in the rapidly-emerging wireless LAN market, while offering a highly differentiated technology. Our WLANPlus technology, combined with our VDSL offering, will allow Metalink to introduce exciting new broadband applications for homes and businesses."

Metalink Ltd.