Paris, France, December 15, 2015

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) has signed collaboration agreements with the industry-leading cloud software and hardware companies, Red Hat, Advantech and 6WIND, to accelerate the delivery of commercial virtualized radio access network (vRAN) products.

Collaboration with these companies will enhance Alcatel-Lucent’s vRAN technology, working on the CloudBand™ NFV platform, ensuring that it will meet service providers’ large-scale performance and reliability requirements.

With ever-growing consumer demand for video data applications, the expected growth of the Internet-of-Things and the advent of 5G wireless technology, service providers are looking to optimize their networks and enable new cost and operational efficiencies. Leveraging its expanded global collaboration with Intel and working with Red Hat, Advantech and 6WIND, Alcatel-Lucent will deliver a fully NFV-compliant virtualized radio access network that meets their stringent high-performance, high-availability cloud needs.

Alcatel-Lucent is trialling its near-commercial vRAN with leading service providers in North America, Asia and Europe using a platform that consists of 6WIND, Advantech and Red Hat hardware and software. In 2016 Alcatel-Lucent will expand these trials using the CloudBand NFV™ platform to onboard and manage applications.

Glenn Booth, vice-president of Wireless Portfolio Management and Strategy at Alcatel-Lucent, said : “We are leaders in vRAN technology and use a strategy of collaboration to integrate leading third-party technologies and deliver world-class products that meet the unique needs of our service provider customers. Working with Red Hat, Advantech and 6WIND we are accelerating the availability of our vRAN, giving operators the flexibility and efficiency they require on a large-scale to meet subscriber data demand into the future.”

About the agreements:

• Alcatel-Lucent and Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, are expanding their existing collaboration on CloudBand and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to jointly enhance NFV-based features and better address the needs of the telecommunications market with open source. This includes the integration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and Red Hat Ceph Storage within Alcatel-Lucent’s vRAN offering.
• Advantech, based in Taiwan, is an industry-leading developer and manufacturer of service provider communications systems. Advantech is supplying its Packetarium XLc PAC-6009, a high-density carrier-grade blade server with switching infrastructure that supports all processing, storage and switching elements in a compact size. Advantech’s PAC-6009 server is ‘NEBS compliant’ for the North American market and fits in a standard rack to simplify network introduction.
• 6WIND is a recognized leader in high performance software using its fast path architecture on standard Linux and industry processors. The company will supply its 6WINDGate product offering a variety of networking and security protocols and features to allow Alcatel-Lucent to optimize the performance of its vRAN technology.

Alcatel-Lucent is also working with a number of service providers to develop innovative NFV-based radio access network technologies. Additionally the company demonstrated its progress with China Mobile, Telefónica and Intel at Mobile World Congress in 2015 and announced the industry’s first live field trial of vRAN technology with China Mobile in July.

Quotes :

Radhesh Balakrishan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat said : ”Red Hat has been delighted to work with Alcatel-Lucent to enable communications service providers to move their applications and services to OpenStack-powered telco clouds in order to take advantage of NFV. Now, we're pleased to bring OpenStack and open source innovation to Alcatel-Lucent’s vRAN solutions which are delivered to mobile operators through the CloudBand NFV platform.”

Ween Niu, VP and General Manager of Advantech Networks and Communications Group said “On the road to 5G and the realization of IoT, collaborations will be essential to accelerate product innovation, speed deployment and deliver greater value to customers. We believe that the complementary technologies brought together in the Alcatel-Lucent vRAN ecosystem will enable a robust and reliable NFV-Infrastructure upon which service providers can truly innovate.”

Eric Carmès, Founder and CEO of 6WIND said : “We are proud to collaborate with Alcatel-Lucent to enable critical large scale vRAN deployments for Mobile Operators. We are leading the migration to NFV deployments such as vRAN with our high performance software that ensures cost-effective virtual networking. Our integrated solution delivers large-scale performance and reliability with a future proofed investment.”

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