REDWOOD CITY, USA - ASSIA, Inc., a leading solutions company for broadband service providers, announced that today the High Court of Justice in London ruled that two ASSIA patents on DSL management technologies are valid and that British Telecom infringes one of the patents.
The court determined that BT uses ASSIA's patented DSL management technology in BT's Next Generation Access ("NGA") network. NGA is the fastest growing portion of BT's broadband network, and provides high-speed access via VDSL.
The two patents in the case, EP (UK) 1,869,790 and EP (UK) 2,259,495, describe inventions fundamental to dynamic monitoring and automatic optimization of DSL networks. ASSIA's patented technologies improve service speeds and consumer satisfaction on approximately 70 million broadband connections on five continents. That technology, incorporated into ASSIA's DSL Expresse® software, enables DSL service providers to increase average broadband speeds and to improve reliability across their networks. Service providers that use DSL Expresse realize a substantial return on investment through improved customer satisfaction, and reductions in churn, customer care costs and unnecessary technician dispatches.
"As a software developer, ASSIA's principal business is to deliver our award-winning products and services to customers," ASSIA CTO Marc Goldburg said. "We attempted for years to work with BT in this spirit. When it became clear that BT was using ASSIA's technology without a license and was not willing to license ASSIA's technology or products, it became necessary to bring this patent infringement claim."
Under UK High Court rules, the court will set a schedule for the damages phase of the case. It is not yet known whether BT will ask the court for permission to appeal.
