Teradyne to Chair Panel at Broadband World Forum; Service Assurance and One-Touch Customer Care in Wide-Scale Broadband Deployments

DEERFIELD, Ill.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 18, 2003--Teradyne, Inc. (NYSE: TER) Broadband Test Division is chairing a panel entitled Maintaining Broadband Performance in the Access Network at the International Engineering Consortium's Broadband World Forum being held in London, September 8-11, 2003. The panel includes several industry representatives describing their experiences providing service assurance in multiple jurisdiction large-scale deployment of broadband services. The speakers will present field results and share their experiences and insights into the current state of broadband service assurance. The presentation will be held at 3:00PM on Wednesday, September 10th at the Broadband World Forum in London. Bob Copithorne, General Manager of Teradyne's Broadband Test Division will chair the panel. Additional speakers include Frank Bauer, Director of Advanced Development at Teradyne's Broadband Test Division; Joe Savage, President, Communications Consulting Associates; and Hady Salloum Ph.D., Executive Director of Solutions Engineering, Telcordia Technologies.

"As growth continues in the deployment of broadband services to the consumer market, service providers are challenged to provide the same level of customer care that consumers currently experience with voice services," says Bob Copithorne, Teradyne Broadband Test general manager, who will be chairing the panel. "The goal is to improve customer service while lowering costs by offering the same 'one-touch' customer care for both voice and data."

“When the number of consumers subscribing to a broadband service reaches mass-market penetration levels, it is essential that support and diagnostics be automated to allow a quick problem resolution without the need for highly skilled technicians”

Among the presentations will be field data from various North American and European service providers showing the key cost drivers in supporting broadband consumers. Broadband services present a whole host of new problems for service providers to address including physical plant, data networking, interconnections with ISPs and content providers, as well as much more complex consumer premises equipment.

Teradyne's approach to service assurance gives providers an integrated approach to testing broadband services end-to-end in network layers 1 to 7. Using a combination of physical layer tests, active TCP/IP testing, and data collection from other operational support systems, Teradyne offers automated, expert systems-based test and analysis that allows the call center agent to quickly and accurately determine the owner of the fault and whether or not a dispatch is necessary.

"When the number of consumers subscribing to a broadband service reaches mass-market penetration levels, it is essential that support and diagnostics be automated to allow a quick problem resolution without the need for highly skilled technicians," says Frank Bauer, Director of Advanced Development for Teradyne's Broadband Test Division. "Teradyne's service assurance platform gives the provider the information that is needed to resolve a subscriber's service problem correctly the first time."

About Teradyne Broadband Test Division

Teradyne Broadband Test Division is a division of Teradyne, Inc (NYSE: TER). The group develops state-of-the-art testing capabilities that support service provider's goals to sell and deploy more broadband services sooner and improve the efficiency of qualification, provisioning, and customer care for DSL and CATV high-speed data networks. Teradyne's 10 years of internet protocol testing experience and industry leading background in layer 1 testing enhances its 30 years experience in providing test systems that support voice customer care for approximately 120 Million voice lines worldwide. Teradyne is the world's largest supplier of automatic test equipment and is also a leading supplier of high performance interconnection systems. The company had sales of $1.22 billion in 2002 and currently employs about 7000 people worldwide. For more information on Teradyne Broadband Test's Products, visit Teradyne at: http://www.teradyne.com/prods/btd/.