Telefónica has selected Alcatel to provide solutions for its access, Metro Ethernet, IP edge and optical transport networks in Latin America, enabling Telefonica to offer new high-bandwidth interactive services to its residential and corporate customers.

The integrated and flexible solutions, reflecting different stages of deployment in each of these countries, will provide higher bandwidth capacity per end-user, with unique differentiated quality of services. This, in turn, will enable the simultaneous delivery of personalized multimedia services such as IPTV, video on demand and HDTV to residential customers and advanced virtual private network services to enterprise customers.

"Our selection of Alcatel as technological partner is based on their broadband, optical and IP service routing market leadership and experience as well as their long-term collaboration with our Group. They inspire us with the confidence we need to ensure that our clients can enjoy the new services demanded with the required quality and reliability", stated Horacio Acerbi, Director Services Technology, Telefónica Internacional (Telefónica Latin America).

Michel Rahier, President of Alcatel's fixed communications activities said, "Telefónica is leveraging Alcatel's unparalleled experience in triple play deployments worldwide. Our network infrastructure, based on IP-based industry-leading solutions, is reinforcing Telefónica's worldwide leadership in advanced communication and entertainment services. This success also strengthens our position as partner of choice in such strategic network transformations".

This award follows the recently announced selection of Alcatel to support Telefónica's broadband network transformation in Spain.

Alcatel is involved in more than 40 major triple play deployments and more than 40 network transformation projects worldwide and is the world leader in broadband access with more than 100 million DSL lines shipped worldwide. According to Synergy Research Group, Alcatel was #2 in the Services Edge Router category in Q2 2006, with a 19% market share and according to Ovum-RHK, Alcatel is the world leader in optical networking for the fifth year running with a 16% market share in 2005.