Proximus and Alcatel-Lucent join forces and expand their strategic innovation partnership

Paris, France, October 21, 2015

Proximus and Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) have announced today the extension of their innovation partnership into new areas aimed at improving customer experience and boosting growth. Based on the existing commercial relationship, the new innovation partnership includes strategic cooperation in fields like improved user experience at home via fixed broadband access and increased mobile coverage and capacity via small cells technology.

Alcatel-Lucent will benefit from Proximus’ strong market presence and expertise and Proximus in turn believes the strong local R&D capabilities of Alcatel-Lucent in Belgium will be key to the innovation partnership .

Proximus and Alcatel-Lucent have defined three domains of collaboration, each of which will deliver superior customer experience either at home or on the go:

1. Get to Fast Faster (GtFF)

The demand for ultra-broadband keeps growing continuously. Building on the earlier cooperation, the focus will be to offer faster access speeds to the customers. This in order to support future bandwidth hungry applications.

2. Experience is Everything (EiE)

Customer experience is now at the core of business success. Happy customers are loyal customers. Therefore, Proximus plans to deliver a new Wi-Fi user experience with any device at home, allowing better self-service capabilities for its customers (MyProximus) and optimizing the management of mobile devices.

3. Small Cells in Operation (SCiO)

Today’s consumers require fast and reliable access to the network at anytime, anywhere and whatever the technology used. Data activity is ever increasing, which demand flawless connectivity, with new products and services coming to the market daily. With Small Cells, Proximus will bring the network closer to the end-user, maximizing its network coverage and capacity.

“At Proximus we pledge to satisfy the evolving customers demand by investing in new technologies to offer them the best quality and service. For example, the usage of Wi-Fi at home is increasing and the new apps need faster access speeds. Thanks to the long term cooperation with Alcatel-Lucent we can let our network infrastructure evolve to support current and future bandwidth demands and offer our customers an outstanding user experience.” says Geert Standaert, Chief Technology Officer at Proximus.

“The long-term innovation cooperation between both of our companies shows our commitment to leading the market in developing the next generation of networks and services. Both Alcatel-Lucent and Proximus have a clear leadership role when it comes to Innovation in Belgium. With an investment of 300m euro a year in R&D, Alcatel-Lucent is a key contributor to the Belgian economy.” said Luc Defieuw, Country Senior Officer of Alcatel-Lucent.

The strategic innovation partnership between Proximus and Alcatel-Lucent creates a flexible framework that will enable the companies to improve their ability to respond to rapidly changing needs by stepping up their joint innovative capabilities.