Ericsson and VimpelCom make the world’s first commercial compressed speech call over an all-IP network

Wednesday, February 8 2006, Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERICY) and VimpelCom, which operates Russia’s Beeline service, are the first to demonstrate 3GPP standard-based compressed speech and signaling (SIGTRAN) over IP in a commercial GSM network.

Speech compression over all-IP, introduced with Ericsson’s Mobile
Softswitch Solution, is the fundamental first step in the migration to an efficient IP network and it greatly reduces transmission requirements.

The first call was made in December 2005 between Yekaterinburg and Nizhniy Tagil in a new VimpelCom coverage area. This state of the art technology will be launched across the whole of this new region in February 2006.

Zoran Lukovic, Vice President, Market Unit Eastern Europe and Central
Asia, says: “We are proud to be selected by VimpelCom for the deployment of the softswitch solution and to support its evolution to all-IP. We are also grateful for their support to achieve yet another world first, confirming Ericsson’s leadership.”

Sergey Avdeev, Executive VP & CTO, VimpelCom, says “Ericsson is a very reliable partner, which guarantees our investments to be future proof.”

Ericsson’s Mobile Softswitch Solution is the world’s most widely deployed softswitch architecture solution. It powers around 50% of the total softswitch architecture mobile networks in full commercial service. Ericsson is also the world leader in developing multi-service IP transport solutions optimized for mobile networks and services and provides fully tested and verified solutions combining both the core network nodes and multi-service IP backbone.

Ericsson is shaping the future of Mobile and Broadband Internet communications through its continuous technology leadership. Providing innovative solutions in more than 140 countries, Ericsson is helping to create the most powerful communication companies in the world.

About Ericsson Softswitch:
Ericsson is the leading provider of Softswitch solutions for both mobile and wireline networks. Ericsson’s solutions are commercially proven and fully standards-compliant, offering an efficient and low-risk evolution of existing circuit-switched networks to a telecom quality, IP based service platform. They use network resources in the most cost efficient way to provide both classic telephony and next generation services. More than 60 fixed and mobile operators worldwide have commercially launched services based on Ericsson’s Softswitch solutions.

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