Lucent Digital Radio Announces Digital Audio Broadcast System Testing With Nassau Broadcasting Partners

Business Wire, March 22, 1999

WARREN, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 22, 1999--The future of digital radio has just gotten a little clearer.

Lucent Digital Radio, a wholly-owned venture of Lucent Technologies, today announced an agreement to test its In-Band On-Channel (IBOC) Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) system with Nassau Broadcasting Partners, L.P.

These are the first tests of Lucent Digital Radio's IBOC DAB system with commercial radio stations. The tests will be conducted in Nassau Broadcasting Partners' radio facilities. Nassau Broadcasting Partners L.P., who have conceived and implemented the first and only statewide radio network in the country, owns and/or operates 15 AM and FM stations in New Jersey. It also owns and/or operates two stations in New York and two in Pennsylvania.

Lucent Digital Radio is developing its IBOC DAB system for consideration as a potential digital radio standard in the United States. The Lucent Digital Radio tests will evaluate several technical issues associated with digital radio, including interference, range of signal, and audio quality.

In the tests with Nassau's stations, Lucent Digital Radio will evaluate its Multi-Streaming technology, which is expected to provide high-quality digital audio reception over a coverage area equal to that of current analog FM stations.

Lucent Digital Radio's IBOC DAB system is an enhancement to current analog AM and FM radio broadcasting systems. It will provide greatly enhanced sound quality for AM radio, near-CD quality for FM radio, as well as interference-free reception and innovative new data services.

The IBOC approach will allow broadcasters to rapidly introduce digital audio programming to listeners on their current dial positions using existing transmitters and antennas. In addition, the system will support datacasting using the existing radio broadcasting infrastructure to deliver information -- such as song titles, weather and traffic reports, financial reports and news -- to consumers with new digital receivers.

"IBOC DAB offers a strong value proposition for us. It enhances our programming, maximizes our signals and increases our revenue streams. With Lucent Digital Radio, we can see a future where we will increase our channels and deliver a new product that goes far beyond the delivery of high-quality audio," said Anthony Gervasi, Jr., senior vice president of engineering and technology for Nassau Broadcasting Partners. "We have not seen evidence from other IBOC proponents that they understand the full scope of this paradigm shift in the way that Lucent Digital Radio does."

Lucent Digital Radio will supply the hardware and software for the field-testing. Nassau Broadcasting Partners will provide the radio sites and also support the test evaluation.

"The opportunity to work with Lucent Digital Radio on what is, in effect, the future of radio broadcasting is tremendously important to us," said Louis F. Mercatanti, Jr., president and chairman of Nassau Broadcasting Partners, L.P. "The results of our tests will enable both our stations' listeners as well as listeners throughout the industry to benefit from these efforts."

Lucent Digital Radio draws on a number of patented Lucent digital audio and channel coding techniques that provide robust digital signal delivery in an impaired broadcast channel, including:

-- Lucent's Perceptual Audio Coder (PAC(TM)) technology

-- Unequal Error Protection, which prioritizes information based on

its impact on audio quality

-- Multi-Streaming, a combination of techniques that extends the

coverage of digital signals by allowing for graceful degradation

of audio quality

"We are on target with our IBOC DAB system design and testing plans. Nassau Broadcasting provides an ideal base of stations that enable our iterative design and system testing to proceed with simultaneous tests of several technical issues," said Suren Pai, president of Lucent Digital Radio. "The team at Nassau is very eager to work with us on our IBOC DAB system."

IBOC, which is being considered as the U.S. standard for DAB, uses existing radio spectrum allocations -- no new allocations or auctions are required. IBOC DAB is both backward- and forward-compatible, meaning that current AM/FM receivers will still be able to receive the existing analog signals in the new system. And when a station elects to turn off the analog signal in the future, IBOC DAB-compatible receivers will operate with the remaining all-digital signal.

"We can see a future where our stations' AM signals will deliver FM quality sound and we will be able to transmit data," said Gervasi. "The radio station of the future will deliver much more than audio, and we want to explore that future with Lucent Digital Radio."

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 technology for the past decade.

For more information on Lucent Digital Radio, visit the Web Site at http://www.lucent.com/ldr or contact William Casey, Director, Marketing & Sales, at 908-580-7008 or email at williamcasey@lucent.com.