Lucent Digital Radio Announces Significant Technical Advance; Reaffirms Royalty-free License Offer to Radio Broadcasters

Business Wire, Jan 14, 1999

WARREN, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 14, 1999--Lucent Digital Radio, a wholly-owned venture of Lucent Technologies, today announced a significant technical advance in its In-Band On-Channel (IBOC) Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) system that solves the problem of providing high-quality digital audio reception over a coverage area equal to that of current analog FM stations. Lucent Digital Radio also announced that it will offer digital radio broadcasters royalty-free licenses for its IBOC DAB system, which will be field-tested this year.

Lucent Digital Radio's advancement, called Multi-Streaming, is based on state-of-the-art capabilities in audio and wireless channel coding technologies from Lucent's Bell Labs, and allows for the best-quality FM audio to be delivered over a wide coverage area, even under impaired channel conditions.

"This new advancement with Multi-Streaming now makes possible a fully digital solution to IBOC even in the hybrid mode, eliminating the need for receivers to fall back on the analog signal," said Suren Pai, president of Lucent Digital Radio. "This solution to the hybrid system is consistent with our objective of generating maximum economic benefit to broadcasters. As we extend the development of IBOC from technology feasibility towards commercial reality, it is important for us to reiterate our position that broadcasters will have royalty-free licenses and easy access to our IBOC technology so we can drive its rapid adoption by the industry."

This innovation, developed recently by Lucent Digital Radio's technical team, will allow new IBOC receivers to transparently reconstruct the digital signal to deliver the best quality sound possible at a given geographic location of the receiver. Until now, digital broadcast systems designed to operate during a multi-year transition period from analog to digital could be received in just a portion of the analog service area. With the Lucent Digital Radio development, the digital signal will be receivable throughout the analog service area, ensuring high-quality audio to all listeners in a broadcaster's current service area.

As a result of this innovation, the digital signal emulates the graceful degradation characteristics of analog signals, instead of the annoying "cliff effects," or "digital drop-outs" experienced by earlier digital systems. This allows for high-quality digital audio even at the edge of analog coverage. No other proposed digital broadcast system offers this unique capability.

"This is the kind of breakthrough that you would expect from Lucent's Bell Labs," said Rick Doherty of Envisioneering, a leading digital media research firm. "Building on Lucent's strength in digital wireless networking, it's consistent with the kind of system architecture that will be required by broadcasters as they move into the IBOC era."

The Multi-Streaming solution works in both AM and FM IBOC systems and is integrated with Lucent's Perceptual Audio Coder(TM) (PAC(TM)). Lucent Digital Radio uses PAC in its IBOC DAB system, which will allow radio broadcasters to transmit higher quality sound over AM and FM, and support the introduction of innovative, low-cost data broadcast services. The PAC encoder converts analog audio signals into a digital signal, then compresses the data by at least 15 to one, so that music, for example, can be represented accurately with only about one-fifteenth the number of bits per second as are used on a compact disc. The PAC encoder enables new capabilities, such as CD-like audio quality at bit rates lower than 96 kilobits per second (Kbps).

Lucent Technologies and its research and development unit, Bell Laboratories, have been leaders in the digital encoding of information used in communications systems, and have been at the forefront of digital audio broadcasting (DAB) technology for the past decade.

Lucent Digital Radio is the second Lucent venture in the digital broadcast market. Lucent Digital Video, announced in January, 1998, markets its industry-leading MPEG-2 encoders to the broadcast, cable, wireless cable, fiber optic and satellite markets. For more information about Lucent Digital Radio, visit the Web site at www.lucent.com/ldr.> 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.