PARIS -- Alcatel (Paris: CGEP.PA and NYSE: ALA) today announced that Ovum-RHK has reconfirmed the company's #1 worldwide position in the roughly US$ 11 billion optical networking market for the fifth year running with a 16% market share. Driving Alcatel's top spot performance were triple play and broadband services to residential users, as well as new high-speed Ethernet services to enterprises.

"Alcatel's worldwide optical networking revenue leadership continues as it focuses on the key drivers for growth in spending, including businessuptake of Ethernet service delivery, broadband adoption, and 3Gdeployments," stated Dana Cooperson, Vice President Optical Networks atOvum-RHK. "Furthermore, the launch of the 1850 Transport Service Switch,which allows service provider transformation to converged networks while extending the use of existing assets, illustrates how Alcatel continues to innovate."

The continued success of Alcatel's Optical Multi-Service Node (OMSN)systems for optical Ethernet aggregation and mobile backhaulingapplications played a key role. Customer wins included Cabovisão in Portugal, China Netcom, China Telecom, T-Mobile in the Netherlands, RAI Way in Italy, Ya.com in Spain and Telmex in Mexico.

Significant contributors to Alcatel's performance also included theMetrospan portfolio along with the sustained momentum of new optical products such as the Alcatel 1678 Metro Core Connect and 1626 Light Manager. In the WDM field, Alcatel scored the first commercial deployment of its 40 Gbit/s solution linking supercomputer clusters in Germany.

The growing business trend in vertical markets was confirmed by new contracts in the research and education, transportation and energy sectors, including DANTE for the GEANT2 pan-European research network, UK Highways Agency for the National Roads Telecommunications Services (NRTS) project, RENATER in France, as well as SBB and 3 power utilities in Switzerland.

"Alcatel's confirmed #1 position is a recognition of our focus on continued product innovation and support for our customers evolving networks," said Romano Valussi, President of Alcatel's optical networks activities. "As convergence adoption is ramping up, Alcatel is helping its customersaddress their network transformation towards packet-based opticalnetworks."

Alcatel (NYSE: ALA; Paris: CGEP:PA)