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Carrier Ethernet World Congress - Madrid Spain, September 26, 20 - Actelis Networks®, the leading provider of Carrier Ethernet over Copper solutions, today announced that COLT, a leading European provider of business communications, has successfully introduced its technology in Belgium, the first phase in a program to boost local access speeds for businesses across Europe. Leveraging existing copper lines, Actelis' innovative EFMplus™ technology enables COLT to deliver cost-effective, advanced data and converged communications to more mid-size businesses at fiber-like speeds and resiliency.

"Demand for greater bandwidth is growing exponentially and the traditional limitations of copper have prevented many businesses from improving their communications and migrating to the next generation of services," said Dr Alireza Mahmoodshahi, Chief Technology Officer, COLT. "COLT is one of the first service providers to unlock this bottleneck using Actelis' EFMplus technology."

Actelis' EFMplus technology can deliver symmetrical Ethernet at speeds of up to 40 Mbps over multiple voice grade copper lines. This ground-breaking technology enables more businesses to access the speeds and features normally only available to those with fiber connections, by using existing copper lines. Actelis' products will be used to deliver COLT's data and converged services, including IP VPN, Internet Access, Ethernet services and COLT Total, COLT's voice and internet access package for midsize businesses.

"We are pleased that COLT is leveraging Actelis' EFMplus technology to offer new, innovative and compelling data, voice and managed services to its customers throughout Europe," said George Lasry, General Manager of International Markets for Actelis Networks. "With Actelis EFMplus products, COLT can now begin to fully tap into the tremendous capabilities of Carrier Ethernet over Copper as a cost-effective, transparent substitution for fiber that delivers high-quality performance and the best rate, reach and resiliency available."

Actelis' Carrier Ethernet over Copper solution allows more businesses to enjoy features such as higher speeds, quality of service (QoS), traffic prioritization and a greater choice of bandwidth options than is currently possible. The new access method will also drive the uptake of new converged services, such as IP Voice, which rely on a high quality and symmetrical underlying network.

Several COLT customers in Belgium are already enjoying speeds of up to 20 Mbps, where the technology has been installed at exchanges in Brussels and Antwerp.

Mahmoodshahi added, "We want to provide more European businesses with the quality of communications that has been limited to larger firms with fiber connections and Actelis is enabling us to achieve this goal with EFMplus. This technology has been a real success with customers in Belgium and we plan to extend it in a phased way to other countries in Europe."

About the Metro Ethernet Forum Interoperability Demonstration moderated by EANTC

The Carrier Ethernet World Congress 2006 in Madrid, Spain, marked the second year that the Metro Ethernet Forum sponsored an Interoperability Demonstration overseen by EANTC, an independent test laboratory located in Berlin Germany. This year to make the demonstration even more real world, EANTC recruited German telecommunications operator T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom to review the test plan. EANTC and technical representatives from 16 member companies supplying Carrier Ethernet equipment and test gear to build and test an Integrated Ethernet network containing a core; aggregation, and for the first time, an Ethernet access network. The test plan consisted of a variety of individual tests for connectivity, performance, compliance with Carrier OAM capabilities and the delivery of network services to support a variety of business and residential triple-play services. For more information visit www.eantc.com.