- Utah Scientific has been awarded a U.S. patent on its revolutionary UTAH-400 iP router, which gives broadcasters real-time, on-the-fly control of port priority, port speed, and security groups on Ethernet networks, the company says. A 24-port managed-gigabit Ethernet workgroup router, the award-winning UTAH-400 iP improves efficiency any time that high-bit rate streaming video or large video files move over Ethernet.
- The United States Patent and Trademark Office assigned Patent No. 7,756,118 for a video switching system utilizing a prioritized common network to Utah Scientific Inc. The inventors are listed as Tom Harmon, Roger Thornblad, Jeff Levie, and Garn Morrell.
- "Utah Scientific has more than 30 years of history with customer-responsive innovation, and the UTAH-400iP is a good example of that," said Harmon, Utah Scientific's president and CEO. "In developing it, we not only invested many hours in R&D, we also interviewed customers, broadcast engineers, IT engineers, and industry visionaries. The culmination of all that is a significant and unique innovation in broadcast technology."
- With its built-in control panel, the UTAH-400 iP uniquely enables real-time network changes in response to traffic conditions so that high-priority items can be moved quickly, while lower-priority items wait their turn. The router also makes it possible for parameters such as bandwidth allocation, QOS, and VLAN assignments to be controlled easily in response to network needs. The router also supports port speed control, which helps troubleshoot network operations besides allowing control of traffic from nodes using too much bandwidth. To protect sensitive content, the UTAH-400iP's control panel makes possible on-the-fly partitioning of a network into smaller virtual networks or security groups.
- "Because it can control an IP network in real time, the UTAH-400 iP allows for much more flexibility in using the network," said Levie, one of the inventors and Utah Scientific's chief technology officer. "As a result, users do not have to suffer with the limitations that typically exist in a network's design. The need for just such a switching device has increased dramatically as IT-based equipment has become much more prevalent in the professional video industry."
- The UTAH-400 iP managed-gigabit Ethernet workgroup router is a freestanding product that can be upgraded to work under command of the Utah Scientific SC-4 Control System, providing users with integrated control of their broadcast and IT routing systems.
