Press Releases

Porto, April 9, 2010 — Vodafone Portugal and Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today performed the first live demonstration of a base station working both in 3G and LTE mode. The upgrade of a live Vodafone Portugal 3G radio base station was made by Alcatel-Lucent to allow it to simultaneously provide both 3G and LTE network capabilities.

This demonstration took place at Vodafone Portugal’s flagship store in Porto using 2.6 GHz spectrum and a 10 MHz channel size, giving customers a three-fold increase in the speed they would experience on a 28.8Mbps HSPA network today.

This event was also the first demonstration in Portugal of the Alcatel-Lucent’s LTE Connected Car, with which it was possible to show a comprehensive menu of entertainment, infotainment and security services including video-on-demand, gaming, home control, advanced GPS navigation, as well as roadway and vehicle monitoring.

Jorge Capelas Fernandes, Vodafone Portugal’s CTO, said “Vodafone Portugal is always looking to ensure that we offer our customers innovative services. This demonstration is part of a wider Vodafone LTE trial program, which is being carried out in a number of countries across the globe, to examine the potential of LTE technology and how it can be used to deliver even better services to our customers in the future.”

“Alcatel-Lucent base stations which are already deployed worldwide – and specifically at Vodafone in Portugal – offer service providers the capability to evolve to the latest wireless technology at their own pace both seamlessly and in a cost effective way. Moreover operators are able to support their existing services without any interruption to ongoing traffic.”, António Neto, Alcatel-Lucent Key Account Manager for Vodafone Portugal said. “To perform this demonstration Alcatel-Lucent took advantage of its deep experience and knowledge acquired thanks to the involvement in the majority of LTE projects being pursued worldwide, António Neto added.”