Re: AT&T Cable Telephony Agreement with ANTC/NT
Thread- Important news for ANTC shareholders. This removes lots of doubts about T's local cable telephony plans. -MikeM(From Florida)
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ANTEC AND NORTEL NETWORKS ANNOUNCE CABLE TELEPHONY AGREEMENT WITH AT&T
DULUTH, Ga., Feb 23, 2000 - ANTEC and Nortel Networks announced today that ANTEC has entered into a comprehensive agreement with AT&T's Broadband unit through which AT&T will use Arris Cornerstone cable telephony products to expand its cable telephony service in eight major North American markets. Arris is a Nortel Networks/ANTEC joint venture company. Under the terms of the agreement, ANTEC will be the exclusive supplier of cable telephony products to the AT&T Broadband markets of Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, Dallas, Hartford, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. This agreement will enable AT&T Broadband to continue to rapidly expand its cable telephony service in these markets.
"Our agreement to use Arris Cornerstone products will help us scale our telephony offers to hundreds of thousands of customers this year and to millions next year," said Curt Hockemeier, executive vice president and chief operating officer of telephony operations at AT&T Broadband. "That scaling, in turn, is already helping us significantly lower our capital costs per subscriber."
"We are very pleased with the technical features and reliability of the current Arris product, which we started testing more than four years ago, and we look forward to trials of the new Arris IP products and capabilities that are planned for delivery later this year," said Tony Werner, executive vice president and chief technology officer at AT&T Broadband. "We are particularly impressed with the PacketPort(R) approach, which combines the service and quality features of today's VoicePort(R) with the functionality of a DOCSIS 1.1 modem. This new generation of Cornerstone products will help us elegantly and cost effectively migrate to full IP telephony solutions. The ANTEC / Nortel team has proven itself to be a premier technology partner for AT&T Broadband in its strategic roll-out of new services for consumers," Werner said.
"This agreement represents a major milestone for all of our companies," said Bob Stanzione, ANTEC president and CEO. "For ANTEC and Nortel Networks, it reinforces the position of Arris as the premier provider of cable telephony equipment worldwide. We have spent much of the past year installing more than 1100 Cornerstone Host Digital Terminals (HDTs) with the capacity to provide over 3.6 million cable telephony lines in these eight markets in preparation for AT&T's announced local telephony roll-out. For AT&T, this agreement underscores its shift into a higher-gear deployment of additional HDTs and more importantly, the delivery of and installation of large numbers of VoicePorts(R) to support their plans for rapid subscriber growth," concluded Stanzione.
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