BellSouth Picks Lucent DMX

MURRAY HILL, N.J. -- Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) today announced that BellSouth Corporation (NYSE: BLS) has chosen Lucent to provide advanced metro optical technology for BellSouth’s Multi Service Provisioning Platform (MSPP). Lucent currently is providing its Metropolis® DMX Access Multiplexer, a SONET (Synchronous Optical NETworking) system designed to increase network capacity and enable new revenue-generating, high-speed services in metropolitan networks.

Lucent Worldwide Services also is providing engineering and installation services to support the implementation of the new metro network.

“The upgrade to next-generation SONET is a key milestone in BellSouth’s aggressive strategy to deploy a flexible high-speed optical infrastructure and increase the optical processing capabilities of our network,” said Bill Smith, chief product development and technology officer for BellSouth. “Our MSPP platform will enable us to offer cutting-edge services over a next-generation SONET infrastructure while adding protected carrier-class reliability to Ethernet and other packet services.”

“Lucent’s next-generation SONET technology will provide BellSouth a full range of SONET and Ethernet services, while reducing operating costs,” said Janet Davidson, president, Integrated Network Solutions Group for Lucent Technologies. “The Metropolis® DMX solution is a key element in BellSouth’s overall plan to support the ever-increasing need for faster, high-capacity voice and data services.”

The Metropolis® DMX portfolio is being used by more than 70 customers worldwide to address the challenge they face in their metropolitan networks. Massive core communications networks meet the traffic demands of millions of individual businesses and residential customers in the nation's cities. Many of these major metropolitan areas have become networking bottlenecks, preventing the cost-effective delivery of high-bandwidth and IP services to businesses and consumers. Lucent Metropolis provides a broad portfolio of products that can eliminate the bottleneck in the metropolitan network, allowing service providers to deliver new high-speed, revenue-generating services such as gigabit Ethernet, virtual private networks (VPN), storage area networks and digital subscriber lines (DSL).

Lucent Technologies Inc.

BellSouth Corp.