Europe France : Alcatel-Lucent announced that, after all regulatory approval have been met, the acquisition of Nortel's UMTS radio access business (UTRAN) and related assets has been completed on December 31st, 2006. In recent weeks, the two companies have achieved a number of significant milestones, the most important being the signature of the definitive agreement on December 4th, 2006.

Nortel received a closing cash payment of US$ 320 million less significant deductions.

With this acquisition, one in four UMTS operators - about 40 customers around the world - use Alcatel-Lucent UMTS solutions. Together with strengthened R&D and a broad products and solutions portfolio, Alcatel-Lucent is now uniquely positioned to lead the network technological evolutions from 3G to 4G - relying on its OFDMA, SDR and MIMO* expertise - to address the customers' needs of today and tomorrow while realizing economies of scale.

"This acquisition will enable the development teams to leverage additional capabilities from the integration into the broader Alcatel-Lucent and we count on the focus of the teams to deliver superior performance in the UMTS domain going forward", said Vivek Badrinath, France Telecom Group EVP Information Technology Networks & product Support.

Commenting on the deal, Boris Nemsic, CEO of mobilkom austria said, "we count on Alcatel-Lucent to serve the needs of mobilkom group moving forward"."Our customers will clearly benefit from the high value this acquisition brings, and the pre-integration work has progressed very well. Our combined expertise and portfolios will enable us to deliver the most compelling UMTS offer for our customers, allowing them to provide their subscribers with innovative and high-speed 3G services. Our aim is to achieve the optimum combination of Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel's technologies, with minimum customer disruption. We are well positioned to capture the UMTS market growth opportunity," said Mary Chan, President of Alcatel-Lucent's wireless activities.

With its undisputable wireless technology portfolio, encompassing CDMA/EV-DO, UMTS/HSPA, GSM/EDGE and WiMAX, Alcatel-Lucent is the only player positioned to craft 4G, taking the best from all technologies, to shape the future and deliver mobile broadband for all.

OFDMA: Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access SDR: Software Defined Radio MIMO: Multiple Input - Multiple Output About Alcatel-Lucent