Alcatel announced that Belgacom, the incumbent operator in Belgium, has selected Alcatel's IP solution for traffic aggregation to support the mass roll-out of triple play services throughout the country.

Under the terms of this contract, Alcatel will provide the equipment and network & service management for a nationwide network that will deliver high quality voice, data and video services to the Belgian residential customers.

Last year, Belgacom selected Alcatel's IP portfolio as the foundation for its nationwide BiLAN© Ethernet VPN service, offering advanced Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) and IP-VPN services to businesses. Now, with plans to make triple play available to its entire residential subscriber base, Belgacom has again selected Alcatel's IP portfolio to deliver bundled triple play services including high-speed Internet, digital TV services and voice over IP.

"Maintaining leadership requires an evolution of the network to prepare it for advanced applications such as triple play that have far much more stringent requirements,"said Philippe Ribonnet, Head of Network and IT Division at Belgacom. "An in-depth evaluation of Alcatel's IP technology has demonstrated its strengths and robustness and the company's commitment to a successful service roll-out from start to finish. Extending the network with this proven Alcatel solution will give us the scalability, reliability and end-to-end service levels that will satisfy our requirements for triple play."

"Offering differentiated services is key to staying ahead of the competition,"said Basil Alwan, President of Alcatel's IP activities. "Alcatel's extensive experience in deploying triple play solutions combined with proven, high performance and feature-rich technology will help Belgacom introduce those services faster to preserve its competitive edge. Service providers worldwide as an integral component of their next-generation service edge have selected our IP portfolio. This selection by Belgacom illustrates a key benefit of Alcatel's IP portfolio, which is the ability to bring even greater operational savings by converging business and consumer services on a single IP/MPLS network."

The Alcatel IP portfolio has key features – including high-availability, quality of service, and scalability – that make it the only solution available today that can reliably deliver triple play consumer and business services concurrently on the same platform. For the triple play roll out, Belgacom selected the 7750 Service Router (SR), 7450 Ethernet Service Switch (ESS) and 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM)

Worldwide, Alcatel's IP portfolio has been selected by more than 100 service providers, including massive, multi-year IP network and service transformation projects at AT&T, BT, TeliaSonera and China Telecom. In the fourth quarter of 2005, Alcatel held second place worldwide for IP edge aggregation with a market share of 25.8 percent, according to Synergy Research Group. Alcatel is involved in more than 35 triple play projects and another 40 network transformation projects worldwide. IPTV services are expected to reach over 70 million subscribers by 2010.