WASHINGTON -- Equant (NYSE: ENT) (Euronext Paris: EQU), an industry leader in global communications services for multinational businesses, has signed a two-year, $2.1 million IP VPN contract with San Jose, Calif.-based Altera Corporation to link nine international sites to its headquarters.

This new contract demonstrates Equant's strategy to develop global, customized and integrated communications services, leveraging its high-end IP VPN strengths, with a particular focus on growing its customer base in the North American market.

Altera is a leader in programmable chip solutions. The smooth performance of Altera's business communications applications - which allows its engineers in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific to share large files - enables the successful delivery of new products to customers.

After considering competing solutions, Altera chose a customized Equant IP VPN solution with three classes of service (CoS) to prioritize business communications applications. CoS will enable the large, top-priority files with engineering specifications to arrive faster and will accelerate the performance of all other applications on the network. The fully managed solution, based on MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) technology, will be fully implemented by the second half of 2004 and allows for future converged voice and video applications.

"We chose Equant IP VPN because it optimized our bandwidth usage and offered MPLS technology that allowed the best possible performance for our mission-critical applications," said Frank Hannig, Altera's chief information officer. "Equant's global footprint, its local support in every region we operate, and its customer-focused approach in working with us to analyze and meet our specific requirements gave us great confidence in the success of our project."

In addition to CoS, communications infrastructure optimization and convergence, Altera will enjoy the following benefits from IP VPN:

- Flexibility. The any-to-any connectivity of Equant IP VPN permits easy deployment by Altera of additional sites as it continues to grow.

- State-of-the-art network. Altera can run all of its business communications applications over a single, high-performance network with strong service level agreements.

- Full management. Equant manages Altera's IP VPN from end-to-end with around-the-clock monitoring and near-real-time reporting via Equant's Web-based customer monitoring tool. This will ease the burden on Altera's in-house IT staff, enabling it to concentrate on the company's core business.

"We welcome Altera to our fast-growing family of IP VPN customers," said Bruce Smith, senior vice president, Equant Sales and Marketing, North America. "We believe the close relationship we have established through the initial in-depth consultative process will expand as Altera leverages the benefits of the network services aspect of their solution."

Altera Corp.

Equant