Alcatel Expands Taiwan's Sparq

HONG KONG -- Alcatel (Paris: CGEP.PA and NYSE: ALA) today announced that it has successfully completed a network extension project for Taiwan's Sparq, a leading island-wide fixed telecom service provider, to offer advanced business and residential services. With the Alcatel solution, Sparq is able to deliver these services on a single, converged platform that lowers its overall total cost of ownership.

Sparq selected the Alcatel end-to-end solution because it offered significant performance, scalability and quality of service benefits over competition. Alcatel supplied its data-aware Optical Multi-Service Node (OMSN) systems providing advanced multi-service aggregation functionality and its 1626 Light Manager (LM) to increase network efficiency and reliability. The new equipment is managed by the Alcatel 1350 management suite, which supervises the entire optical networking portfolio enabling complete control over optical networks and maximizing network service revenue.

"As the Taiwanese market is experiencing migrations in both the regulatory and technology fields, operators need to focus on their capital and operational expenditures, while guaranteeing end-user satisfaction," said Ta Fu, Network Group Vice President at Sparq. "Through our cooperation with Alcatel, we can offer a broader range of time-to-market business and residential services, while protecting our previous investments."

"This award strengthens our successful cooperation with Sparq and reconfirms Alcatel as a leading player in addressing operators' requirements for network convergence," said Romano Valussi, President of Alcatel's optical networking activities "Alcatel's expertise in optical networking, boosted by our strong local presence, were fundamental to our selection by Sparq."

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