China Unicom Broadband Online and ASSIA to Improve 10 Million DSLs

REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 21, 2013) - ASSIA, Inc., a leading solutions company for broadband service providers, and China Unicom Broadband Online, the Internet and value-added service provider of the China Unicom Group, announced a strategic agreement to deploy ASSIA's network management systems across China. The China Unicom Group will also benefit from ASSIA's recently announced portfolio of Expresse Solutions. The contract includes 15 provincial operations covering more than 10 million DSL customers.

Under the terms of the contract, China Unicom Broadband Online plans to introduce DSL Expresse diagnostics and optimization features to enhance its broadband-on-demand and value-added services. ASSIA's solutions have demonstrated significant benefits to China Unicom Group operations by boosting the performance of its copper-based DSL infrastructure to meet China's national broadband plan requirements.

As consumers demand ever-higher speeds and greater reliability, ASSIA's powerful, platform-agnostic software solution offers sophisticated diagnostics and optimization features. Based on state-of-the-art algorithms, these features are designed to help service providers leverage existing copper plant investments well into the future.

• DSL Expresse analyzes data collected from DSL equipment to produce powerful and unique DSL and physical layer performance diagnostics. These diagnostics help the operator improve customer care and increase technical staff efficiency, significantly reducing the number of steps required to restore service, and reducing expensive technician visits through improved problem localization. The unique diagnostic functionality will be integrated into China Unicom Broadband service offerings with industry leading interface capabilities.
  
  
• DSL Expresse automatically applies DSL profiles without human intervention in order to improve the quality of experience for individual consumers, based upon the product and service tiers the consumer has purchased. Operators have traditionally defined a limited number of profiles for their network and applied them to their DSLs manually, using simple criteria such as loop length. ASSIA's innovative optimization functionality provides unique capabilities to ensure optimized speed with the best possible stability for each DSL connection. This further helps to drive customer satisfaction rates higher, and to ensure DSL service revenue growth from existing copper-based networks.
  
  

The partnership is designed to improve the residential broadband experience in both urban and rural areas. ASSIA's DSL Expresse products and solutions help China Unicom Broadband Online accelerate time-to-market for its high-speed Internet service offerings, which include a range of value-added services and future OTT video services.

China Unicom Broadband Online based its decision criteria on ASSIA's superior results in stabilizing and optimizing DSL lines and its multi-vendor support for DSLAM technologies. In addition, the partnership model gives China Unicom Broadband access to an entire ecosystem of ASSIA expertise to help further optimize the network, and help protect investments in the company's existing DSL infrastructure.

"DSL Expresse is an important technology that China Unicom Group believes will enable us to meet the requirements for the Broadband China mandate. Based on these new capabilities our Unicom Broadband Online team can improve broadband service experience, deliver higher speeds and provide more value-added services in China," said Jack He, GM of China Unicom Broadband Online.

"We're delighted to work with China Unicom to ensure high-speed, quality Internet that supports China's advanced initiatives for delivering quality broadband to its citizens," said Dr. John Cioffi, CEO and chairman of ASSIA. "Increasingly, telecom operators around the world are seeing the value of deploying ASSIA management solutions as an integral part of a successful broadband strategy to deliver improved quality, higher speeds and deeper network insight."

About China Unicom Broadband Online CO. Limited ("CUC BB")

CUC BB is a wholly-owned Tier-2 subsidiary company of China Unicom Group Inc. Its main business focus is providing value-added services for broadband networks and mobile networks. For broadband networks, the services that CUC BB provides include IPTV/OTT back-end video streaming systems, OSS and multimedia terminals, broadband bandwidth-on-demand (BOD) and others. In the mobile VAS area, mobile mailbox, mobile WAP, mobile search engine, instant messaging, newspaper and online gaming, are provided to all mobile customers of China Unicom Group and subsidiary companies.

About ASSIA, Inc.
ASSIA, Inc. is a strategic supplier and trusted solutions vendor to broadband service providers worldwide. ASSIA solutions enable providers to grow revenues, increase customer satisfaction, improve operational efficiencies, and deliver new multimedia content to the broadband-enabled home. ASSIA has more than 60 million broadband lines under contract with top-tier service providers worldwide and is backed by strategic investors, including AT&T, Mingly China Growth Fund, SFR Development, Sandalwood Partners, Sofinnova Partners, Stanford University, Swisscom Ventures, T-Ventures, and Telefonica. For more information, visit www.assia-inc.com.

Expresse is a registered trademark of ASSIA, Inc.

"ASSIA" is an acronym for "adaptive spectrum and signal alignment."