Alcatel-Lucent cements WiMAX market leadership with string of new contracts, introduction of Wave 2 technology and expanded terminal partnerships

Mobile World Congress - Barcelona, February, 2008 – At the Mobile World Congress trade show and exhibition, which opens here today, Alcatel-Lucent is reasserting its commercial leadership in mobile WiMAX, extending its industry-leading position with a string of new customer contracts, the introduction of advanced Wave 2 infrastructure and the further expansion of its open terminal partnership program.

Alcatel-Lucent is coming off its strongest month of WiMAX deal-making to date, having inked Rev-e (IEEE 802.16e-2005) contract wins with Worldmax in the Netherlands and Packet One in Malaysia as well as several additional operators yet to be publicly disclosed. Alcatel-Lucent’s commercial Rev-e deployments worldwide now total 22 - more than any other vendor.

Alcatel-Lucent paved the way for the latest series of full-scale contracts through a slew of trials and commercial deployments in 2007 that generated confidence in the maturity of its Rev-e solutions. To date, seven customers in Europe, three in the Middle East and Africa, five in the Asia-Pacific region and seven in the Americas have signed on to roll out WiMAX services based on Alcatel-Lucent’s Rev-e solution, which supports fixed, nomadic and mobile broadband services. Success across diverse geographies also reflects Alcatel-Lucent’s unique ability to provide the entire set of required technologies and services on its own – from consulting, to design of end-to-end network solutions, to deployment, and operations and support anywhere in the world.

“These wins -- which include Tier-1 fixed, mobile as well as convergence-minded greenfield service providers, in both established and high-growth markets -- reflect the market’s recognition of the maturity of our product, thanks to our early commitment to WiMAX Rev-e technology back in 2004,” said Karim El Naggar, head of Alcatel-Lucent’s WiMAX activities. “Through the large number of networks we are already powering up worldwide, we’re accumulating unmatched expertise at helping customers smoothly translate WiMAX into a cash-generating broadband business.”

Alcatel-Lucent also is pushing the product-development envelope, now providing customers worldwide with the fourth release of its WiMAX solution, which already includes all wave 2 functionalities and will be used for the upcoming WiMAX Forum certification process. With this new release base stations can, for the first time, combine both MIMO and beam forming, depending on the environment and the coverage and capacity requirements of the operator. Moreover, this latest release is shaped by the experience gathered in more than 70 trial and commercial deployments worlwide and thus includes extended network monitoring and optimization features, as well as advanced load and stress-defense mechanisms. Finally, with this release, Alcatel-Lucent’s becomes the first Rev-e infrastructure vendor to simultaneously support terminal equipment based on chipsets from virtually all of the leading chipset suppliers on the same network, living up to the promise of a fully standardized and interoperable end-to-end solution.

The base station line-up covered under the new release – which also boasts multi-carrier capability for ultra-high bandwidth requirements -- is diverse, supporting a wide variety of configurations, adaptive to various customer needs due to its modular and flexible design, from low-density rural coverage to high-capacity urban deployments.

The Mobile World Congress 2008 also represents a new high-water mark for Alcatel-Lucent’s ongoing campaign to foster a vibrant, open and competitive terminal ecosystem. The ranks of device suppliers participating in its WiMAX Rev-e offer expanded further last week with the addition of Oki of Japan. Manufacturers such as Sanyo, Asus, Quanta Computer and Accton also recently joined the WiMAX interoperability testing (IOT) program under Alcatel-Lucent’s Open CPE Strategy. At its Mobile World Congress booth, Alcatel-Lucent is showcasing a range of new devices from these and other partners. Joining them will also be devices from long-standing Alcatel-Lucent terminal partners such as Intel, Zyxel and Samsung.



With dozens of Rev-e trials underway worldwide, Alcatel-Lucent is expecting commercialization of the technology to proceed to mass scale this year.



“2007 was the year when market momentum erased any doubt about WiMAX’s role as a key technology,” El Naggar added “This year, Rev-e will become a cash-generating business for our customers, with tens of thousands of paying customers signing on worldwide to enjoy WiMAX broadband services. We’re excited to see that this next-generation wireless technology is getting at least as much traction in our high-growth markets as in the more mature economies.”