CALABASAS, Calif. -- Tekelec (NASDAQ: TKLC) announced that French operator Bouygues Telecom, a subsidiary of the Bouygues Group, has filed a complaint against Tekelec in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California seeking compensatory damages of $81 million, plus punitive damages associated with a service interruption Bouygues Telecom experienced in its network in November 2004. In its complaint, Bouygues Telecom alleges the service interruption was caused by the malfunctioning of certain virtual-HLR servers provided by Tekelec to Bouygues Telecom. Although Tekelec is currently evaluating the claims asserted by Bouygues Telecom, Tekelec intends to defend the action and believes the carrier's claims could not support the damage figures alleged in the complaint.

At the time of the incident, Tekelec and Bouygues Telecom personnel worked together to restore service as quickly as possible. The technical root cause of the service interruption has been traced to the interaction between a widely-used, industry-standard database algorithm and particular circumstances existing at Bouygues Telecom.

Tekelec President and CEO Fred Lax commented, "While we regret that Bouygues Telecom has chosen to pursue litigation to resolve this matter, we remain committed to and continue to work with Bouygues Telecom as its network vendor in the implementation of several ongoing projects. Tekelec's signaling products enjoy an unparalleled reliability record. Today, Tekelec network components reliably carry more than four billion call-minutes a day to over 300 million subscribers in 40 countries worldwide. We want to assure our valued customers that network reliability continues to be our primary goal and their confidence in our solutions is our number one objective.

"We believe that the circumstances which gave rise to the service interruption at Bouygues Telecom are unique, and have never occurred elsewhere. We want to assure all our customers that we are committed to product reliability above all and are confident that no other customer should have a similar occurrence."

Tekelec Inc.