Louisville, Colorado, April 30, 1998— Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs®) has announced that 12 high-speed cable modem equipment suppliers will be participating in the CableLabs® Interop™ demonstration at Cable '98, the annual convention of the National Cable Televison Association (NCTA) in Atlanta from May 3 to 6.

CableLabs® Interop™ is a public interoperability demonstration of high-speed standards-based cable modem equipment which will be held during the convention. CableLabs Interop will be located in Booth 4878, Hall H, of the Georgia World Congress Center.

The companies involved in the demonstration are active members of the cable industry's Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) process managed by CableLabs. The companies with cable modem headend equipment and with cable modems are: 3Com; Bay Networks, Inc.; Broadcom Corp.; Cisco Systems, Inc.; and Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc. Those companies with cable modems only are General Instrument; Hayes Microcomputer Products; Intel Corp.; Libit Signal Processing; Motorola; Samsung Electronics; and Thomson Consumer Electronics.

To date, seven rounds of testing have been conducted. The prior rounds of tests were conducted at the CableLabs incubator, located in Louisville, Colorado, where there are three interoperability labs—prototype, product and system. These same 12 vendors and others are working to complete their efforts in the prototype and product labs and to move into the system laboratory which uses CableLabs in-house cable system.

"These companies have shown a high level of commitment and have invested resources working at the CableLabs interoperability laboratories, and their DOCSIS standards-based products have successfully participated in CableLabs' interoperability testing," said Robert C. Cruickshank, vice president of Broadband Internet Access at CableLabs.

Products and services from the following companies are supporting CableLabs® Interop™ : Alpha Technologies, American Internet Corporation, and YAS Corporation.

The DOCSIS interoperable cable modem effort began about 2-1/2 years ago when the cable industry expressed its strong interest in having interoperable, non-proprietary cable modems, modem headend equipment and silicon available from multiple vendors. The industry invited existing and prospective vendors to join in an open effort to design and to specify interconnection points for modems. Key components of this draft specification have been adopted as standards by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE), and by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

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 is dedicated to pursuing new cable telecommunications technologies and to helping its cable operator members integrate those advancements into their business objectives. Cable operators from around the world are members. CableLabs maintains additional web sites at www.cablenet.org, www.ebif.tv and www.tru2way.com.

CableCARD™, CableHome®, CableLabs®, CableNET®, CablePC™, DCAS™, DOCSIS®, DPoE™, EBIF™, Go2BroadbandSM, M-Card™, OpenCable™, PacketCable™, PeerConnect™, and tru2way® are marks of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.