Lucent Technologies Announces Sales of Optical Digital Television DTV Equipment to Three Provinces in China.

BEIJING, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 19, 1999--

NAB SHOW, BOOTH No. L12146

Lucent Furthers No. 1 Position in China's DTV Market

With Sales to Fujian, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang Provinces

Lucent Technologies today announced sales of digital television (DTV) equipment to three provinces in China. The combined forces of Lucent's Optical Networking Group and Lucent Digital Video, a wholly owned venture of Lucent Technologies, have sold equipment to the Fujian Province Post and Telecom Administration, the Jiangxi Province Radio and Television Bureau, and the Wenzhou City Radio and Television Bureau, based in the Zhejiang province. The sales reaffirm Lucent's market leadership position with the majority share of China's growing DTV build-out.

The Lucent DTV equipment enables high-quality video to be passed through a network in an efficient, flexible manner. The equipment is based on the worldwide MPEG-2 (Motion Picture Expert Group) standard. The largest part of the recent sales, a US$3.3 million contract from the Jiangxi Province Radio and Television Bureau, is a particularly impressive example of MPEG-2 over fiber in a single network. The Jiangxi network includes 37 units of Lucent Digital Video's award-winning digital video encoder and decoder, the Lucent VideoStar(TM) system, which is part of the Optical Networking Group's Lucent WaveStar(TM) Digital Video System(TM) (DVS) offering.

The Jiangxi network also includes15 WaveStar Add/Drop Multiplexer (ADM) 16/1 multiplexing units; 8 Synchronous Line Multiplexer (SLM) units; 20 Lightwave Booster Amplifier (LBA) units, and 8 Intelligent Synchronous Multiplexer (ISM) units. The WaveStar ADM will provide Jiangxi with an integrated SDH and MPEG-2/ATM solution, which gives superior bandwidth efficiency and flexibility.

The deal complements earlier digital network wins that Lucent Digital Video has made in China, including the installation of the world's first optical MPEG-2/ Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) network in Zhejiang, as well as digital networks in Hainan and Hubei. The Hubei network remains the world's largest optical MPEG-2 network, spanning 36 cities.

"China's expanding digital television infrastructure requires the kind of flexibility and robust design that Lucent is uniquely positioned to deliver," said Mike Chan, Chairman, Lucent China. "The Fujian, Jiangxi, and Wenzhou City networks incorporate our latest optical systems with the most recent version of the WaveStar MPEG-2 encoder. Combined with our other optical video network wins in China, we are creating showcase DTV networks for the next century today."

When combined, Lucent's SDH, ATM and MPEG-2 system allows for a single network to carry video, voice, and data and it provides remote locations with video through the centralized network.

Lucent's fiber-optic digital video installation in Fujian, Jiangxi, and Wenzhou City will allow broadcasters to add and drop programming for each city in a flexible manner. The networks are part of the China digital television infrastructure build-out. Each of China's 23 provinces are expected to use MPEG-2/ATM/SDH over ATM as the standard platform for transmitting digital television.

"Lucent's strength as a video networking company is unmatched. As broadband networks become more common, our combined optical-MPEG-2 systems will become the standard-bearer for emerging DTV market opportunities," said Andreas Papanicolaou, president of Lucent Digital Video. "These latest networks are strong examples of how Lucent is taking aim at the worldwide digital video industry."

Lucent's SDH architecture is used throughout China today in the national, provincial, city junction, and rural networks. The Fujian, Jiangxi, and Wenzhou City systems will use ATM over STM-16 links running at 2.5 gigabits per second.

For more information on the Lucent VideoStar system, visit the Lucent Digital Video Web site at www.lucent.com/ldv. For more information on Lucent's SDH products, visit www.lucent.com/netsys/opticalnet/

Lucent won an Engineering Emmy Award in 1997 for its pioneering work in DTV as a member of the HDTV Grand Alliance. The company, which contributed to the original MPEG-2 specification, also built the world's first MPEG-2 and HDTV encoders.

Lucent Digital Video is one of several new entrepreneurial business groups formed by Lucent to bring to market the best of Bell Labs technologies. Leveraging decades of Bell Labs, research and development, the group was formed to manufacture and market digital video products, including encoders. Lucent Digital Video markets its product line for cable, wireless cable, fiber optic and satellite back-hauling, DBS (Direct Broadcast Satellite) and other applications worldwide.

Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, data networking systems, business telephone systems and microelectronic components. Bell Labs is the research and development arm for the company. For more information on Lucent Technologies, visit the company's web site at www.lucent.com.