Louisville, Colorado, November 28, 2000—Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs®) announced that more than a dozen key companies have joined a royalty-free pool for intellectual property rights (IPR) in the proposed CableHome™ home networking interface specification. CableHome, the name for the home networking initiative underway at CableLabs, has a primary objective of extending cable services into the home networking environment.

The companies that have signed the agreement, and that are participating actively as vendor authors of the CableHome specification, are: 3Com, Adaptive Networks, Arris Interactive, Atheros Communications, Broadband Home, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Conexant Systems, DoBox, HighSpeed Surfing, Intel, Intersil, Magis Networks, Navic Systems, Philips Digital Video, Proxim, ShareWave, and Terayon Communication Systems.

These vendor authors have agreed to help CableLabs and its member companies draft a specification for interoperable interface requirements. Products meeting these requirements would allow cable operators to extend the features of the DOCSIS™, PacketCable™, and OpenCable™ platforms across home networks in transparent fashion to cable customers.

"This is a tremendous step for the cable industry and the CableHome process," said Dr. David Reed, CableLabs Chief Technical Officer and Senior Vice President, Strategic Planning, and the CableLabs staff member who has headed the CableHome project. "CableLabs is confident that by having the IPR pool defined early in the process, it will help reduce the uncertainties vendors may encounter in producing DOCSIS, PacketCable, and OpenCable products for consumers using home networks," Reed said.

CableLabs' goals in creating the CableHome specifications are to define open interoperable interfaces to which any company can build products and to encourage their broad and uniform adoption across the industry. The CableHome specifications do not require any specific product implementations, thereby leaving the vendors free to compete equally in an open and competitive market.

Any company desiring to build DOCSIS, PacketCable, and OpenCable-compliant products will be able to include the CableHome interfaces in their products on a royalty-free basis if they sign the agreement. More companies are expected to join. This pool is modeled after the royalty-free pools created for the Data over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) and PacketCable projects.

The CableHome specification will be released in stages, with the first group of specifications scheduled to be issued in the first quarter of 2001. These initial specifications will define key interfaces necessary to enable vendors to build a broad spectrum of home networking products that will enable the delivery of DOCSIS and PacketCable services throughout the home.

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.

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