StarBurst allowed patent application on multicast technology that has potential to break looming Internet logjam; StarBurst also lands $6.1 million in financing to develop and market applications based on innovative Multicast File Transfer Protocol.

CONCORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 29, 1996-- The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has notified StarBurst(tm) Communications Corporation that its patent application for multicast file transfer technology has been allowed for issuance as a U.S. Patent. This technology has the potential to provide significant relief for congestion on the Internet and corporate Intranets, and is the basis for StarBurst's Multicast File Transfer Protocol (MFTP(tm)), which the company plans to submit to the Internet Engineering Task Force for consideration as an open Internet standard.

In addition to its patent, which it expects to be granted by the end of the year, fast-growing StarBurst announced it received $6.1 million in new venture capital financing from three of the leading venture capital firms in the high technology industry, Integral Capital Partners, Canaan Partners, and Greylock Management, to continue developing products based on this technology.

"The value of multicasting has been weakened in the past because of its inherent unreliability," said John McConnell, president, McConnell Consulting, Inc., Boulder, Colo. "StarBurst has enabled a breakthrough with reliable multicasting which will enable many more applications that will conserve network bandwidth, reduce the cost of ownership, and provide higher, more sophisticated multicasting applications." MFTP: Moving data from one point to many simultaneously, reliably, efficiently

Multicasting is sending information from one source to many, but not all, receivers over a network. It can be used to transfer software files, transmit real-time audio and video, and distribute continuous streams of messages such as market data and news feeds.

StarBurst's MFTP(tm) makes sending data to many receivers more efficient by taking advantage of multicast support in networks, which uses a minimum amount of network bandwidth to simultaneously transmit files from one sender to many receivers.

"Widespread use of multicast technology will reduce the amount of network bandwidth needlessly burned up by redundant data transmission over the Internet backbone," said StarBurst Chairman and Chief Technical Officer C. Kenneth Miller. "Multicasting is an inherently efficient means to distribute information over a network by using backbone bandwidth only once, even if there are thousands of recipients. Multicast technology will be critical to helping the Internet accommodate its expected growth from tens of millions of users today to hundreds of millions of users over the next decade."

StarBurst introduced StarBurst Multicast last year. Since then, the company has continued refining the MFTP protocol specification based on customer experience with the product, and will submit MFTP to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a request for comment (RFC) by the end of the year. The company pursued a patent on the key elements of MFTP as a defensive maneuver, to ensure that the protocol would become an open standard, rather than a single vendor proprietary solution, Miller said. The company received a Notice of Allowance from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in April on its patent application.

"It's inevitable that standardized multicast technology will become a core component of the Internet and corporate Intranets, primarily due to its ability to support one-to-many information distribution in a highly efficient manner," said Fred McClimans, founder of CurrentAnalysis, an analytical research firm located in Ashburn, Virginia. "I'm pleased that StarBurst has decided to open up this technology to the public domain through the IETF - as an independent startup, they have a good chance to unify the existing multicast technologies offered by the major networking hardware vendors."

Investors show confidence

Huge traffic surges are expected to hit the Internet and corporate Intranets over the next five years as bandwidth-hungry voice and video transmissions become more common and enterprise-critical data traffic increases. InterNIC, the group that assigns Internet addresses and domains, estimates that as many as 10,000 new domains were added to the World Wide Web every month in 1995, and International Data Corp. expects the number of Web users to grow from about 16.4 million in 1996 to 65.8 million in 1999. IDC also expects the number of Internet users to grow to 256 million by 1999, up from about 30 million today.

"This explosive network growth will fuel demand for technologies such as StarBurst's MFTP that make information transmission dramatically more efficient," said Roger B. McNamee, general partner at Integral Capital Partners of Menlo Park, Calif. "Even if only the most conservative estimates of network usage growth are born out, it's clear that the Internet's technology infrastructure has to advance to accommodate significant traffic growth. We believe that StarBurst will play an important role in that evolution, and we're excited about joining their investment team," McNamee said.

Integral is one of three lead investor groups that contributed to StarBurst's 1996 venture capital funding of $6.1 million, along with Canaan Partners of Rowayton, Conn., and Menlo Park, Calif., and Greylock Management Corp. of Boston, the firm that led StarBurst's first round of venture capital funding in 1995.

Greylock and Canaan officials agreed that StarBurst is carving out an important niche in a fast-growing market. "As an information distribution network, the Internet already had economy and global reach. Now StarBurst has added efficiency to the equation," said Roger Evans, general partner at Greylock.

"StarBurst's ability to secure a patent for the key elements of its Multicast File Transfer Protocol demonstrates its potential in this rapidly developing field," said Eric Young, general partner at Canaan Partners. "The market is showing demand for more efficient information transfer technology, and StarBurst appears ready to meet that demand."

StarBurst will use the $6.1 million in new venture capital funding to expand its engineering, sales and marketing operations, said President and CEO Harland K. LaVigne. "This round of funding will allow StarBurst to continue developing and marketing innovative multicast solutions for the Internet and corporate Intranets," LaVigne said. "We're very pleased that these major investors have shown confidence in StarBurst's potential."

About MFTP

MFTP supports simultaneous, reliable, one-to-many file transfers over any kind of multicast-capable network. Because MFTP leverages the simultaneous data transfer capability of multicast in the network infrastructure, it is far more efficient than using multiple point-to-point file transfers for one-to-many information delivery. MFTP breaks files into blocks, then breaks the blocks into frames that are sent sequentially over the multicast network in a single pass, or complete transmission of all blocks that make up a file. MFTP ensures that files are delivered reliably using a negative acknowledgment (NAK)-based scheme to retransmit only lost or bad frames. On each pass through the file, receivers notify the sender of lost or bad frames that are then re-transmitted to all receivers in subsequent, progressively smaller passes.

StarBurst Multicast, based on MFTP, is the first multicast file transfer application that can efficiently distribute large amounts of data to hundreds or thousands of receivers simultaneously. In addition, StarBurst Multicast features an adjustable transmission rate for throttling the speed of transfers, and supports the ability to resume interrupted transfers without having to retransmit the entire file.

StarBurst Multicast is a cross-platform application that currently runs on Sun Solaris, Sun OS, Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows, DOS, and OS/2 platforms.

About StarBurst Communications

StarBurst Communications Corporation, the multicast solutions company, is a leader in developing innovative solutions for electronic information delivery via multicast networks. The Concord, Mass.-based company is privately held and venture capital-funded. More information can be found at StarBurst's World Wide Web site: http://www.StarBurstcom.com. -0-

StarBurst, StarBurst MFTP and MFTP are trademarks of StarBurst Communications Corporation. All other products mentioned in this document are trademarks of their respective organizations.

CONTACT: Stephen Collins

StarBurst Communications

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Christine LeCompte

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