Louisville, Colorado, May 8, 2000—Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs®) announced today the release of the final feature set for PacketCable™ residential IP voice service.

"The release of this feature set demonstrates the progress the cable industry is making toward its goal of delivering high-quality, full-featured Internet protocol-based voice services to our customers," said Mark Coblitz, Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning for Comcast Corporation and the industry chairman of the PacketCable project.

The final feature set consists of two subsets of residential features, basic and extended, as designated by members of PacketCable�s Business Committee, one of two key committees (the other is the Technical Committee), which direct the work priorities, schedules and requirements of the overall PacketCable project. The Business Committee is composed of CableLabs member representatives from such companies as AT&T Broadband, Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation, Cox Communications, MediaOne, Rogers Cablesystems Ltd., and Time Warner Cable.

The Business Committee designated PacketCable residential features to be either basic or extended features, to give guidance to vendors in their development of product capabilities. The Business Committee recognized that the product development process takes time, and that vendors would not necessarily be ready to support all residential features in time for the early stages of technical trials.

The list of basic residential features represents the priority set of features that the Business Committee believes should be supported by PacketCable IP voice equipment in order for cable operators to offer voice services commercially to residential customers. Of course, it remains the prerogative of the cable operators, in making their individual purchasing decisions, to choose which user features to require. The basic residential feature list, along with detailed descriptions, was released as a draft Technical Report on January 31, 2000, for review and comment by a group of approximately 240 participating industry vendors. That report will be published as final Technical Report later this month.

The list of extended residential features completes the PacketCable residential feature set; they represent what remains of the complete feature set that the Business Committee has deemed necessary to sustain an ongoing IP-based voice service, and what they would like vendor equipment to support as soon as is feasible. The extended residential feature list and detailed descriptions will be issued as a draft Technical Report and will be made available to participating industry vendors for review and comment later this month.

Steve Craddock, Vice President of New Media Development for Comcast Corporation and the chairman of the PacketCable Business Committee, said, "The basic and extended features lists are intended for those vendors planning to build residential IP voice products according to PacketCable 1.0 interface specifications. The purpose of the Technical Reports is to communicate to the vendor community the total list of residential features that the Business Committee has identified, defined, and prioritized by consensus."

"We hope that by identifying the Business Committee�s residential feature set, the vendor community will be able to develop products speedily and reduce the costs for making an IP voice service available," said CableLabs� Julia Brodsky, Project Manager, Business Strategy. Brodsky coordinated vendor input into development of the feature set and descriptions.

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.

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