Louisville, CO, April 11, 1995—Cable Television Laboratories, Inc., (CableLabs®) has received U.S. patents for a system that uses cable networks to deliver wireless telephone services, and in the transmission of data in a television signal. Manufacturers interested in licensing the technologies should contact CableLabs.

The wireless telephony patent is for a technology called "Digital Remote Antenna Driver" or "D-RAD." This technology will be used to provide personal communications services (PCS), expected to be an important new business area as the cable television industry expands into new telecommunications services markets.Several CableLabs members and manufacturers are incorporating remote antenna driver into their wireless approaches.

The technology digitizes and time-compresses the telephone signal between a base station and one or more remote antenna sites, connected via a cable television system. The CableLabs' patent on digital technology flows out of work done by Rogers Cablesystems Ltd. on analog technology, or RAD. CableLabs has a patent pooling agreement for remote antenna driver technology with Rogers Cablesystems, one of its members.

Rogers Communications, on behalf of CableLabs, issued an RFP last year for RAD technology for use in Canada.Rogers Communications is the parent company of Rogers Cablesystems Ltd.

Dr. Richard R. Green, president and CEO of CableLabs, indicated that CableLabs and Rogers began work on RAD technology over four years ago."This patent allows cable systems to take advantage of one of their strengths, their distributed network, to provide additional services."

The other patent focuses on data sent via a television signal in the vertical blanking interval, which is modulated using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) techniques.This invention provides robust digital data transmission at a significantly enhanced rate over a broadcast channel, while also providing immunity to multipath interference.

Tom Williams, senior member of technical staff with CableLabs' engineering department and the inventor, explained that this system is an improvement over conventional OFDM broadband systems because it allows more time for processing the data that is transmitted.

CableLabs is a research and development consortium of cable television system operators representing more than 85% of the cable subscribers in the United States, 70% of the subscribers in Canada, and 5-10% of cable subscribers in Mexico.CableLabs plans and funds research and development projects that will help cable companies take advantage of future opportunities and meet future challenges in the television industry.It also transfers relevant technologies to member companies and to the industry.In addition, CableLabs acts as a clearinghouse to provide information on current and prospective technological developments that are of interest to the cable industry.

About CableLabs: Cable Television Laboratories (www.cablelabs.com) was founded in 1988 by members of the cable television industry. A non-profit research and development consortium, CableLabs delivers innovations that enable cable operators to be the providers of choice in their markets. Cable operators from around the world are members. CableLabs maintains additional web sites at www.cablenet.org and www.ebif.tv.

CableLabs® is a registered trademark of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. Other CableLabs marks are listed at http://www.cablelabs.com/certqual/trademarks. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.