Bright House Networks' Tampa Bay Division Selects BigBand Networks for Digital Broadcast, Transport, and Video Service Assurance.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

Cable-Tec Expo 2003

PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 12, 2003

BigBand BMR Installation Leverages Gigabit Ethernet Transport to Protect Against Inclement Weather, Fiber Cuts and Equipment Failure

BigBand Networks, Inc., a leading provider of broadband multimedia platform solutions for broadcast television and on-demand services, today announced that Bright House Networks has selected the Broadband Multimedia-Service Router (BMR(R)) platform to provide digital broadcasting with service reliability.

BigBand Grooming and BigBand Transport Gateway have been installed on the BMR in the Tampa Bay division that serves more than one million cable subscribers. The installation is configured for redundancy switching, such that failures in content or components are overcome by dynamically switching to source live programming from alternative facilities via Gigabit Ethernet transport.

"Bright House Networks is committed to providing high quality, reliable video services to our subscribers," said Gene White, vice president of engineering for Bright House Networks' Tampa Bay division. "BigBand Networks is leveraging the benefits of Gigabit Ethernet transport, using their established BMR platform with the addition of technology to automatically and cost effectively achieve redundancy switching for our entire digital video service. The Tampa division is eager to continue working with BigBand Networks to enhance offerings to subscribers and improve economics of operating our broadband network."

Greater service assurance is a competitive imperative for cable operators. Causes of service disruption include headend component failure, line cuts, and inclement weather effecting satellite downlink feeds, which is occasionally encountered in the Tampa area. Manual resumption of service is expensive and complicated, involving intensive maintenance and customer support, which are often required during off hours.

"Television is becoming an increasingly critical information service to subscribers, and in some parts of the U.S., like the Tampa area, the service can be most vulnerable when it is most necessary," said Amir Bassan-Eskenazi, president and CEO of BigBand Networks. "BigBand Networks leverages the BMR's switching and media processing foundations to deliver a solution for automatically restoring digital video service, with significant business benefits for operators. With this deployment, our count of digital cable subscribers served by BigBand BMRs with Gigabit Ethernet transport passes one million, and we add Bright House Networks as our seventh top ten cable operator customer. Their selection of BigBand Transport Gateway for redundancy switching is significant validation of this capability, and of the BMR as a video services platform."

The Bright House Networks Tampa Bay division is using the BigBand BMR to control its digital broadcast line-up with BigBand Grooming in multiple headend facilities, with RateShaping(TM) bit rate adaptation applied for enhanced bandwidth efficiency. BigBand Transport Gateway allows the live digital video content to be shared between these facilities by Gigabit Ethernet. BigBand Transport Gateway utilizes the BMR's media processing to convert between protocols and to assure video quality. The BMR also performs intelligent switching to direct content towards the appropriate facility. Should a broadcast feed fail due to a component fault, line disruption, or problematic downlink, a real-time switch is made to an alternative source via transport for the impacted broadcast content.

The BigBand BMR installation in Tampa illustrates multiple business benefits. Gigabit Ethernet is a low cost, flexible and scalable means of transporting content between facilities, benefiting from ongoing technological innovation. Using the protocol for redundancy switching enhances subscriber loyalty because of better service reliability, and assures revenues from certain transactional offerings, such as pay-per-view events, by avoiding service disruptions. Additionally, the strains on maintenance and customer support resources are reduced because recovery is automated and instantaneous.

About BigBand Networks

BigBand Networks, Inc. designs, manufactures, sells and supports platforms for broadband, multimedia services. These platforms are built on the company's NativeMedia(TM) technology uniquely capable of communicating and processing video, audio and data in their native formats. The field-upgradeable architecture combines advanced hardware and software technologies, for high performance with agility to optimize for each service supported. This enables network operators to cost-effectively expand revenue-generating offerings of broadcast-quality content and advanced, interactive services. Services supported by the BigBand Networks' platforms include digital broadcast television, HDTV, transport of high quality video, ad insertion, VOD and iTV. The company's customers include Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Adelphia Communications, Mediacom Communications and Rogers Cable. BigBand Networks is based in Redwood City, CA. For more information on the company, please visit www.bigbandnet.com.