Bharti Airtel and Alcatel-Lucent Form Managed Services Joint Venture for Broadband and Telephone Services

PARIS and NEW DELHI - JV Will Manage Airtel’s Migration to Next Generation Networks (NGN) to Offer Advanced Services Like High-Speed Internet, Triple Play, Media-Rich VAS, MPLS, VPN for Both Retail and Business Customers

- First Managed Services Partnership for Broadband and Telephone Services in India

Bharti Airtel, Asia’s leading integrated telecom service provider, and Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced that they have formed a joint venture to manage Bharti Airtel’s pan-India broadband and telephone services and help Airtel’s transition to next generation networks. Under the joint venture, Alcatel-Lucent will design, plan, deploy, optimize and manage Bharti Airtel’s broadband and telephone network across India. A new legal entity is being formed which will be operated by Alcatel-Lucent.

Commenting on the partnership, Manoj Kohli, CEO & Joint Managing Director, Bharti Airtel said, “This joint venture is another step towards Bharti Airtel’s vision to continuously redefine and deliver the benchmarks of customer experience. We will leverage Alcatel-Lucent’s global expertise in IP transformation and network management while allowing us to focus on customer delivery and market growth.”

“It will also help us accelerate performances as we migrate to next generation networks for our broadband and telephone customers, opening the door to advanced services and applications,” he added.

“We appreciate the opportunity that Bharti Airtel has given us to demonstrate our worldwide expertise in network transformation, managed network services and IP transformation,” said Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. “The expansion of our relationship is drawn on our strengths as a global services player, ready to partner with innovative customers in their business transformation plans,” he added.

This managed services partnership will include all end-to-end activities - service rollout, installation and fault repair, service continuity and transformation. It will support Bharti Airtel’s transformation to next generation networks, offering advanced services like high-speed internet, triple play, media-rich VAS, MPLS, VPN for both retail and business customers. The partnership will also drive optimal capital investment and increase operational efficiency by moving voice and data traffic onto a single, ‘packetized’ infrastructure.

About Bharti Airtel Limited:

Bharti Airtel Limited, a group company of Bharti Enterprises, is one of Asia’s leading integrated telecom services provider with operations in India and Sri Lanka and an aggregate of over 96.6 million customers as of end of March 2009, consisting of 93.92 million mobile customers. Bharti Airtel Limited has been voted as India’s most innovative company, in a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal.

Bharti Airtel is structured into three strategic business units - Mobile services, Telemedia services and Enterprise services. The mobile business offers services in India and Sri Lanka. The Telemedia business provides broadband and telephone services in 95 cities, DTH services and has recently forayed into the IPTV services. The Enterprise business provides end-to-end telecom solutions to corporate customers and national and international long distance services to carriers. All these services are provided under the Airtel brand. Airtel’s high-speed optic fibre network currently spans over 101,337 kms covering all the major cities in the country. The company has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems - i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Europe. For more information, visit www.bhartiairtel.in

About Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is the trusted partner of service providers, enterprises and governments worldwide, providing solutions to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the communications industry. With operations in more than 130 countries and the most experienced global services organization in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with a global reach. Alcatel-Lucent achieved revenues of Euro 16.98 billion in 2008 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on the Internet: www.alcatel-lucent.com

PARIS and NEW DELHI, April 30 /PRNewswire/ –

Source: Alcatel-Lucent

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