Expanded MAN capability at Belgium's Mobistar live with equipment from ECI Telecom's Lightscape Networks

February 5, 2002 - Lightscape Networks (Petah Tikva, Israel), an ECI Telecom Company announced that it has completed the first phase of an agreement with Mobistar (Brussels, Belgium) to provide enhanced capacity to the Belgian cellular provider's metropolitan area network. Mobistar, an affiliate of Orange, owned by France Telecom, now carries live traffic over network equipment under Lightscape Networks' XDM metro solution umbrella.

The complete project involves two solutions in the XDM family, BroadGate(tm) and uSDM(tm)-1, for deployment as customer premises Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) equipment. The systems are a central feature of Mobistar's metropolitan area network supplying fixed line telecommunications services to customers throughout Belgium. In addition, Mobistar is using the systems in their GSM network to reduce operational costs and improve overall network management, and will extend this network to support development of its General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and Universal Mobile Telecommunications Services (UMTS) offerings. The network has been carrying live traffic since Q2 of 2001 and the latest BroadGate deployment is carrying live traffic since Q4 of 2001.

Lightscape Networks' BroadGate(tm) Access solution divides the capacity of typical fiber access networks to enable the delivery of data and voice services directly to subscribers' premises and works with any standard SDH network.

"Mobistar is the latest in a series of cellular operators to select Lightscape Networks' technology for building out their GSM network capacity," said Eran Dariel, President and CEO of Lightscape Networks. "Our equipment offers them a cost-effective way to immediately boost capacity, eliminate network bottlenecks and prepares them for migration to optical networking over time."