Swissvoice's IP Phones Fully Interoperable with Cirpack's Local Exchange Switches

The Swissvoice / Cirpack solution allow smooth migration of carriers infrastructure to Next Generation VoIP Services

BONNEVILLE and PARIS, France, June 28, 2002 – Swissvoice, a major telephone supplier for European operators, and Cirpack, a leading vendor of next-generation equipment for telecom operators' voice infrastructures, today announced the successful completion of interoperability testing between Swissvoice's IP phones and Cirpack's Class-5 SoftSwitch. As Premium Partner" in the Cirpack Alliance Program", Swissvoice guarantees continuous interoperability with Cirpack equipment.

Building on their long experience in fulfilling European operators specific needs, Swissvoice and Cirpack are providing a complete carrier-class solution to smoothly introduce new generation of public telephony services based on IP.

Cirpack's Local Exchange switches can be deployed in any infrastructure (IP, ATM, TDM) to deliver a wide range of voice services (ISDN PRI and BRI, VoDSL, WLL, VoIP, etc.). Service providers can now build infrastructures connecting any local loop to any core network, and change their strategy at any time when new opportunities arise. This allows massive reduction in both investment and operational costs.

Using Swissvoices IP15 and IP20 phones, subscribers benefit from all the advantages of legacy telephony along with many advanced convergence features. For instance, Swissvoices IP15 and IP20 can recognize and execute services not implemented in the phone, but enabled by service providers from the Local Exchange switch via MGCP. With the Swissvoice/Cirpack solution, operators can easily introduce high margin VoIP services.

Our corporate partnership ensures that deployments made today will remain compatible when the VoIP technology evolves over time," said Yves Girod, Head of Development for swissvoices IP products. Cirpack's IP solution offers operators and service providers an architecture which can be deployed for any residential and corporate customer specific needs via any packet-voice technology. Cirpack's universal solution matches swissvoice's strategy for open IP phones."

We are pleased to welcome Swissvoice as a Premium Cirpack Partner," explains Frédéric Potter, Cirpacks CTO and Senior VP. Swissvoice IP Phones are reliable, high quality products, delivering strong feature sets at a low cost. Together with Cirpack Class-5 SoftSwitch, Swissvoice IP Phones should allow operators to widely deploy toll-quality IP-based voice services and generate new revenues."

About swissvoice S.A.
Swissvoice S.A. develops and supplies telephones to most European network operators. Swissvoice is an internationally active fabless group with more than 170 employees in Switzerland and France and revenues of approximately Euro 150 Million. As a major telephone supplier with a strong technology base in analog, ISDN, DECT and VoIP, swissvoice's strengths lie in the supply of high-quality phones well suited for the use of Telcos network services. With its IP-Phones, swissvoice actively participates to the networked world of tomorrow. For more information, visit swissvoice S.A.s web site at www.swissvoice.net/products/ip.

About CIRPACK
CIRPACK develops next generation Local Exchange and Transit switches with native support for TDM, ATM and IP networks and protocols simultaneously. Based on open platforms running standard technologies, CIRPACKs equipment are fast and easy to deploy and allow savings of 50% in CAPEX (investments) and 70% in OPEX (operations). CIRPACK deployed the world largest SoftSwitch-based TDM/Packet PSTN with more than 30 Class-5 SoftSwitches and 150 Media/Signaling Gateways, as early as 1998.

CIRPACKs carrier-class solutions help telecom operators preserve existing investments when introducing next generation voice services such as VoDSL, VoIP, VoWLL or VoCable. CIRPACKs highly scalable telephony platform meets the need of small service providers having few customers as well as those of larger operators looking for multi-thousand E1 nodes.

CIRPACKs customers include Kaptech (LDCOM Group), Tiscali, Free Telecom, Hallo Telecom and Altitude Telecom among others. CIRPACK is a European company headquartered near Paris. For more information, please visit www.cirpack.com or contact info@cirpack.com.