IMON COMMUNICATIONS SELECTS ADARA TECHNOLOGIES TO SOLVE POWERKEY CONDITIONAL ACCESS ‘TIME-OUT’ ISSUE

TORONTO, ON – December 19, 2023 – Adara Technologies Inc. (www.adara-tech.com) today announced that it has been chosen by ImOn Communications of Cedar Rapids, IA to provide the cable broadband operator with its PowerKEY 2024 Conditional Access Time-Wrap Solution that will allow ImOn to continue operation of its Scientific-Atlanta, Cisco and Technicolor set-top boxes and DTAs beyond the anticipated timeout date of November 2024 for all such boxes. ImOn provides services to approximately 13,000 subscribers throughout Iowa.

The Adara solution solves the looming issue of what will happen next year to millions of digital cable set-top boxes that utilize the PowerKEY conditional access (CA) system developed by Scientific-Atlanta in the 1990’s. An internal CA time clock issue will cause each device to roll over to zero in November 2024, preventing the set-top from decrypting video, effectively making each inoperable. Operators have been looking for a solution that would enable these set-tops to continue operation past the November 2024 date in order to eliminate the need for an expensive, customer-disruptive set-top box and CableCARD replacement or a forced IP-based video network upgrade.

“Set-top boxes with PowerKEY conditional access, estimated to total 20 million or so currently in the field, have many more years of excellent operational life remaining,” said Stan Koukarine, CTO and Co-founder of Adara Technologies. “Our solution, which has been chosen by dozens of cable operators including ImOn, covers all generations of PowerKEY, including devices that use embedded security, CableCARD modules or downloadable forms of PowerKEY. We initially developed the solution fix for our own video control platform that we manage for dozens of operators and began making it available to the rest of the industry earlier this year.”

Tony Bennett, Director of Operations for ImOn Communications, said, “Adara’s PowerKEY Time-Out Solution enables us to extend the shelf life of our set-top boxes without negatively impacting our customers with a risky patchwork of disruptive code downloads and box swaps, while we work to further enhance our customer experience through ongoing network upgrades for Broadband expansion and IPTV migration. This solution is one part of a 3-year support agreement we have with Adara that also includes complete support of our DBDS/EC video ecosystem.”