Vodafone Spain Completes Successful Trial of NetSpira's MMS Management System
NetSpira's System Already In Use at Vodafone Spain

17 March 2005 - Madrid, Spain
NetSpira Networks today announced that Vodafone Spain's Product and Services Department has successfully completed a trial of ECS-MMR, a new feature of NetSpira's ECS platform. ECS-MMR has been in commercial use by Vodafone Spain for over a year.

Rogelio Martinez, head of the Centre of Competence for JSLEE technologies of Vodafone Spain, said: "Ensuring the success of our MMS network is a business-critical priority for us. The NetSpira ECS-MMR provides a way to eliminate bottlenecks in our MMS network. NetSpira has proved once again that it is ahead of the game - anticipating the needs of mobile and cellular operators and developing must-have products."

NetSpira's ECS-MMR (Multimedia Message Relay) is an intelligent router for multimedia messages (MMSs). It provides operators with the fastest - and most cost-effective - method for delivering and managing MMSs. By using MMR, operators can:

• increase capacity to cope with surges in demand for MMS processing and value-added services - for example, New Year's Eve celebrations or for football fans who wish to see a goal via video to their mobile phone.
• divert traffic from MMSCs (Multimedia messaging centres) and send messages directly to remote servers. This reduces the number of expensive MMSCs needed and ensures that the mobile data network is being efficiently used, eliminating expensive, unnecessary diversions.
  
• detect when a phone is not capable of receiving an image or a video and take alternative action, for example, inform the recipient that delivery is not possible and direct him/her to a URL to view the clip.

NetSpira's Executive Vice President, Salim A. Mawji and CEO, Jose Lopez, jointly said: "The results of this trial show the formidable performance of our NetSpira ECS-MMR product. NetSpira's ECS solution is the market-leading choice for mobile data operators who are actively looking for new advanced services from multimedia messages."

The NetSpira ECS-MMR was introduced in Vodafone Spain's next-generation messaging architecture to greatly improve the performance of large MMS messages (e.g., containing images and video), while retaining its ability to rapidly introduce new MMS-based services or to easily modify existing ones. During the trial, Vodafone and NetSpira were able to demonstrate how the NetSpira ECS-MMR can handle many thousands of messages of MMS traffic with just a 6 U high node.

The trial used several value-added services running on the top of Open Cloud Rhino's 1.2, a JAIN™ SLEE standards compliant service logic execution environment for carrier grade implementations. Open Cloud's Rhino enables operators and service providers to execute new service deployment strategies rapidly, cost effectively and independently from current and future underlying networks, providing an evolutionary path for the delivery of revenue generating services.

More about ECS-MMR

The NetSpira ECS-MMR is a carrier-grade, high-availability and high-performance platform for managing MMS traffic. It provides an advanced routing and control layer to the operator's existing and future MMS infrastructure. The NetSpira ECS-MMR analyzes the headers and contents of the messages, and, based on that information, it can route the messages to different MMSCs or other interfaces (e.g. MM1, MM3, MM4) and it can also invoke different value-added services.

MMR is sold as an add-on to NetSpira's flagship ECS (Enhanced Charging Solution) product. ECS enables mobile data network operators to identify the type of data traffic being sent and received. This means that operators can introduce service-differentiated charging to maximize revenues- but at the same time decrease costs for many customers.

Both ECS and MMR fit in with the existing infrastructure of operators, so no replacements of existing technology are needed. ECS has also been deployed and is in commercial service in Vodafone Spain, Telefonica Moviles España, Eurotel Praha, Optimus in Portugal, MobileOne in Singapore and Virgin Mobile in the US, along with other prominent GSM/GPRS and CDMA Operators in Asia and the Americas.

About NetSpira Networks

NetSpira Networks is an innovative company focused on enabling content-based charging, service-differentiated routing and message management in IP-based mobile networks, such as GPRS, UMTS and CDMA networks. NetSpira Networks is headquartered in Madrid, with the R&D office in Barcelona and commercial offices in the UK.