PETAH TIKVA, Israel -- ECI Telecom (NASDAQ: ECIL), a leading provider of advanced communication solutions and Civcom, a manufacturer of Opto-electronic components, modules and subsystems, today announced the world's first compact 10Gbps widely tunable transponder designed to bring significant cost and performance benefits to both metropolitan area and long haul ROADM networks. With the proliferation of triple play and business data applications, carriers can build their Optical Transport Networks (OTN) while saving spare-part costs and reducing total cost of ownership. The new transponder provides a new class of convenience and price points, delivering more network functionality for optical networks.

Developed by Civcom and ECI, this new transponder will enable ECI's customers to reduce costs and experience performance benefits that full C-band tunable lasers provide for both metro and long haul networks. This full C-band widely tunable transponder dramatically cuts the total cost of ownership by reducing the number of transponder spare parts needed from 40/80 to one, as a single transponder can replace any working transponder in the commonly used ITU-T grid. It also remotely selects and changes the actual wavelength, and when combined with ECI's ROADMs, it easily provisions new wavelengths and enables the rerouting of existing ones for services such as traffic balancing and restoration.

Typically, WDM vendors offer widely tunable lasers only for long haul systems while the metro systems are limited to tunable lasers of up to 4/8 wavelengths. The unique compact size of this new module makes it ideal for metro networks, where compact size, modularity, and cost effectiveness are key.

Designed for ECI's XDM(R) All Range(TM) WDM/ROADM system and part of ECI's OTN offerings, the highly compact transponder plugs into the XDM universal traffic card. This card is used for all transponder and combiner applications for both metro and long haul networks.

"This innovative solution demonstrates our technological development efforts to significantly reduce inventory costs and enables customers to remotely configure traffic in both metro and long haul networks. We are already receiving orders in large numbers and the feedback from our customers is extremely positive," said Eyal Shaked, Executive Vice President and General Manager of ECI Telecom's Optical Networks Division. "This is an important step in ECI's approach for one system to cover access to core next generation WDM/OTN networks."

ECI Telecom Ltd.

Civcom Inc.