Comcast Corp. cleared up a legal snarl left over from AT&T Broadband,
settling a lawsuit filed by a small private company over passive fiber-coaxial
transmission technology.
Under the agreement, C-cation Inc. will extend a patent license to Comcast
for its passive hybrid fiber-coaxial architecture technology. Financial terms of
the agreement were not released, nor is Comcast releasing any information on how
it plans to use the technology in its existing cable-plant architecture.
A private company based in Rye, N.Y., C-cation filed suit against the former
AT&T Broadband last July, charging that the MSO’s "LightWire"
passive-optical-transmission technology had infringed on its patents.
The LightWire architecture, which was tested in Salt Lake City in 1999,
created mini-nodes to push fiber closer to customers, boosting bandwidth for
voice-, video- and data-service delivery.
"We are excited that we now have an ongoing business relationship with
Comcast," C-cation president Alexander Cheng said in a release. "We look forward
to deploying our other patented technological solutions to the cable
industry."
C-cation is also working on a server-software communication-control module to
oversee product offerings, Cheng said.
