ARRIS announced that one of its major customers, UPC Broadband, the European broadband division of Liberty Global, Inc., has reached the milestone of deploying voice service to over one million telephony subscribers within its European footprint. UPC's telephony deployment count has doubled over the last 15 months and has been driven by the accelerated growth of UPC's VoIP (Voice over IP) based Digital Telephony service. Over the years, ARRIS has been a strategic supplier of headend and customer premises cable telephony solutions to UPC Broadband, from the days of constant bit-rate voice to their current successful digital voice deployments.

The UPC VoIP service is of the highest quality and is attractively priced to form a real alternative for consumers to the existing telephone service of local market telecom incumbents. UPC initially launched its Digital Telephony service in the Netherlands, Hungary, France and Switzerland, and, more recently in Austria, Poland and Romania, expanding its footprint to seven European markets. During 2006, UPC's VoIP telephony service will be offered in the Czech and Slovak Republics and in Ireland. The networks of UPC Broadband in Europe currently pass approximately 18 million homes in Europe of which 9.3 million are ready to receive telephony service.

For the rollout of VoIP services to residential customers, UPC has selected a number of key vendors as leading technology suppliers including ARRIS, and is one of the industry's first cable operators to deploy SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) based VoIP services, laying the foundation for new feature-rich voice and multimedia services - such as presence, instant messaging, video and mobility - and taking the first step towards the integration of mobile and fixed telephony.

The deployment of VoIP-based equipment such as soft-switches, gateways and customer premises equipment (integrated cable modem and telephony adapters like the ARRIS Touchstone product line) fit into UPC's strategy to provide enhanced triple play services to its customers. Going forward, the company also plans to develop and offer a VoIP/SIP-based converged product portfolio over a single IP network to both fixed and wireless networks. UPC plans to introduce integrated fixed-mobile services in Switzerland and other key markets based on these SIP Softswitch platforms.

"VoIP is a vital part of UPC Broadband's strategy of providing a completely integrated voice, video and data service tailored to the needs of our residential and business customers," said Gene Musselman, President and Chief Operating Officer for UPC Broadband. "Vendors like ARRIS have helped us with our packet network transformation by delivering solutions that support our next generation SIP-based services."