www.alcatel.com

Alcatel announced today that it has been awarded by Etisalat, one of the leading service providers in the Middle East, a new turn-key contract to expand its existing Intelligent Networks (IN) in the United Arab Emirates.

The new project will provide Etisalat with the service-enabling technology needed to offer cutting-edge mobile services such as Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) including the combination of pictures, animations, audio and text, and ultimately video and audio streaming.

Under the terms of this contract, won in open tender against other leading edge vendors, Alcatel will supply Etisalat with a complete Intelligent Network solution built on its proven Open Services Platform (OSP) to cover the entire Emirates. In addition, the solution includes Alcatel's Prepaid Suites (PPS) which gives the operator the ability to apply prepaid charging in real time for voice, data and content in a GPRS network.

Since the Alcatel Open Services Platform is an extensible platform, new applications modules and payments modules can easily and quickly be added to run 3G applications. Alcatel's new generation payment solution can extend voice, data, content, messaging delivery into prepaid - post-paid convergence on mobile networks. It can also easily integrate with existing modules of other payment solutions and is able to inter-work with a multi-vendor network.

The new network and associated services are expected to be operational in the United Arab Emirates by the end of 2003.