PARIS -- Alcatel (Paris : CGEP.P and NYSE : ALA) today announced the acquisition of the technology of Aravox Technologies Corp., a privately held company in Arden Hills, Minnesota. Aravox's technology will become a part of Alcatel's Next Generation Network offer. Alcatel's Next Generation Network portfolio offers to service providers advanced Voice over IP turnkey solutions, which decrease infrastructure costs and prepare networks for value-added real-time applications. Aravox's technology within Alcatel's solutions makes real-time packet peering over IP both secure and highly available. "Quality of Service (QoS) enabled Voice over IP networks will be the beginning of a powerful transformation in the way residential and business services are made available by service providers," said Michel Rahier, President of Alcatel's fixed network activities. "The acquisition of this technology by Alcatel will significantly enhance the value of our next generation network solutions offered to our customers and will drive the transition to value-added real-time IP applications."Alcatel is one of the industry leaders in next generation softswitching, offering to service providers complete solutions for voice-over-packet and multimedia applications. The acquisition of Aravox technology strengthens Alcatel's Next Generation Network product portfolio by adding a session border controller to the Alcatel 5020 Softswitch based solutions. The Aravox session border controller, relying on the IETF Midcom standard, makes real-time packet peering over IP secure and ensures quality of service and high availability of network resources to the end-to-end communications it controls. With this acquisition of technology, Alcatel offers a complete solution for both carrier-to-carrier peering and service provider-to-enterprise peering. Aravox Technologies Inc.Alcatel SA