Lucent Win: Cincinnati Bell Selects Lucent Technologies in Three-Year Agreement to Upgrade Intelligent Network Hardware and Software for Potential New Services - Company Business and Marketing

EDGE, On & About AT&T, March 29, 1999

Lucent Technologies Wednesday announced a three-year agreement to provide Intelligent Network (IN) hardware and software to Cincinnati Bell that will enable the carrier to offer a host of advanced customer services. Lucent's IN platform enables carriers to offer their customers services such as custom announcements, which allows customers to set different telephone answering messages at different times of the day; call screening services, which block unidentified calls such as those from telemarketers; voice dialing and call waiting.

"The Intelligent Network is a vital part of Cincinnati Bell's product offering for its customers," said Greg Weisker, Cincinnati Bell's director of network architecture planning. "With the Lucent agreement, Cincinnati Bell plans to expand these offerings and continue to provide the best in intelligent network services." "Cincinnati Bell's reliance on Lucent to upgrade its IN platform shows a continuing commitment to offer services that make people's lives more manageable and productive," said Dave Geary, regional vice president for Lucent Technologies. "And it shows that Lucent has the flexible and feature-rich platform to help Cincinnati Bell reach its goals." Lucent's IN platform consists of the following components: o Service Creation Environment (SCE) -- a set of software tools that enables service providers and third-party developers to rapidly design, develop and maintain new services such as call screening. o Services Control Point (SCP) -- an intelligent database server that provides call handling instructions for wireline and wireless switches or other network elements. o Service Node/Intelligent Peripheral (SN/IP) -- a multiple application platform that allows for the deployment of revenue-generating services that offer features such as voice announcements, fax storing and forwarding, text-to-speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition and other advanced telecommunication services. o Service Management System (SMS) -- supports centralized operation, administration, maintenance and provisioning of intelligent network elements. Cincinnati Bell is a subsidiary of Cincinnati Bell Inc., a full-service, integrated communications company that provides competitive local communications as well as Internet, wireless, entertainment, directory and data networking services to customers in the Cincinnati, Ohio, metropolitan area and in many other Midwestern cities. Cincinnati Bell is on the World Wide Web at cincinnatibell.com. Lucent offers a wide range of Intelligent Network solutions that allow service providers to offer wireless, wireline and Internet services to consumers across a variety of protocols. Lucent's wireless IN software solutions allow consumers to take advantage of services such as Prepaid, Short Message Service and Calling Party Pays. Lucent also offers a wide range of IN-based wireline and Internet services such as Flexible Number Routing, Long-Distance Platform and Internet Call Waiting. Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, business telephone systems and microelectronic components. Bell Labs is the research and development arm for the company. For more information about Lucent Technologies, visit the company's web site at http://www.lucent.com.