Vodafone Italy Selects Lucent Technologies’ Intelligent Network Platform For Its HomeZone Project

AUGUST 03, 2006, ROME - Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) today announced that Vodafone Italy has deployed a Lucent intelligent network solution for its HomeZone project and the carrier has launched “Vodafone Casa” commercial service.

The “Vodafone Casa” service allows subscribers to use their mobile phones both as home phones and as a mobile device, enabling subscribers to pay the same attractive tariffs for mobile calls as for calls originated when at home.

“Vodafone Casa” is our way to respond swiftly to the competitive market through simple and innovative propositions to the customer. The new voice offer will allow Vodafone to play in the fixed operator playground while maintaining the convenience for our customers of a unique “handset”/number" said Didier Lebrat, chief technology officer at Vodafone Italy.

“The success of the HomeZone project with Vodafone Italy demonstrates our ability to address complex challenges for our service provider customers, and deliver the most innovative, multi-vendor solutions to help our customers better serve their subscribers,” says Gianluca Baini, Vodafone account director at Lucent Technologies. “The most important criteria that Vodafone considered in implementing the innovative application was the ability to guarantee the high-performance and reliability requirements needed for the service. The collaboration between Lucent and Vodafone on this deployment is an example of the best practices in the industry.”

The “Vodafone Casa” service, which replaces fixed telephone service, uses Lucent’s SurePay® Real Time Rating and Charging Suite, which enables the carrier to determine where a call is originated. A subscriber can define their HomeZone area and benefit from a different tariff when originating calls from their home area. Subscribers benefit from a single number, single service for all of their communication needs – whether at home or on the go.

Lucent’s services organization conducted the network integration for this project, providing the deployment and network migration services to help Vodafone Italy introduce the new capabilities on its multi-vendor network and launch the commercial offer.

Lucent’s SurePay® suite has been commercially deployed in networks worldwide with a base of more than 135 million subscribers. Lucent’s solution provides a single real-time rating engine for both prepaid- and postpaid-customers; it also supports data and content charging via Diameter, the on-line charging interface specified by 3GPP standardization body for the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) service delivery architecture.

The Lucent SurePay® suite offers a state of the art and highly scalable, converged pre-paid and post-paid billing solution that provides support for a wide variety of voice, data, content charging and e-commerce services. By using the Lucent solution, Vodafone is able to provision all services on a single system. The system also features real-time rating and call-control capabilities – including call screenings and announcements of account status -- which make it easier for Vodafone and its customers to track and control spending.

About Lucent Technologies
Lucent Technologies designs and delivers the systems, services and software that drive next-generation communications networks. Backed by Bell Labs research and development, Lucent uses its strengths in mobility, optical, software, data and voice networking technologies, as well as services, to create new revenue-generating opportunities for its customers, while enabling them to quickly deploy and better manage their networks. Lucent’s customer base includes communications service providers, governments and enterprises worldwide. For more information on Lucent Technologies, which has headquarters in Murray Hill, N.J., USA, visit www.lucent.com.

About Vodafone Vodafone is the world’s largest mobile community, with equity interests in 27 countries and Partner Networks in a further 31 countries, serving over 179 million proportionate customers.

Contact Information

Harald Kettenbach

Lucent Technologies

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