Bellcore to license COMMON LANGUAGE codes to Telmex.

MEXICO CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 18, 1995--Bellcore today announced that Telefonos de Mexico, S.A. (Telmex) has signed a five-year license agreement for Bellcore's set of data-naming conventions called COMMON LANGUAGE codes. As the 64th telecommunications company to license the technology, COMMON LANGUAGE codes will give Telmex a common way of referring to telecommunications services and equipment, making it faster and easier for Telmex to deploy new services to consumers.

The license agreement, valued at about $1 million, offers Telmex a standardized, efficient, and economical way to identify, inventory and maintain records for every entity of its telephone network. This could range from Telmex buildings and circuits, to lines and computers, to the tiniest electronic components.

According to Henry Garcia, Bellcore's Language Standards account manager, as companies like Telmex become increasingly mechanized and reliant on computers for their operations they need a language that allows information to "flow through" one operations system to another. COMMON LANGUAGE is a registered trademark of Bellcore

Telmex joins other international telecommunications companies using Bellcore's COMMON LANGUAGE codes. Others include Telesoft Italia SpA and DACOM in South Korea. "With this most recent agreement we now have license agreements with 64 telecommunications carriers and more than 650 equipment vendors worldwide" Garcia said. "The more companies use these codes, the more effective this universal identification language becomes."

COMMON LANGUAGE is a unique vocabulary that uses an extensive, organized set of codes to identify and distinguish virtually every piece of telecommunications equipment and telephone company location. Each number or letter in an 8-11 character code tells the computer or user something about the particular entity to which that code was assigned. Individual characters describe the entity's location, function or manufacturer (see backgrounder).

In the case of Telmex, COMMON LANGUAGE codes will offer the company a way to streamline its service provisioning, planning and engineering functions since every entity of the network can be tracked and inventoried. "Telmex's various operations systems will know exactly what equipment is deployed in the network, where that equipment is located and its function," Garcia said. Since Telmex will be using the COMMON LANGUAGE vocabulary companywide to identify this information, operations systems will be able to relay it to each other.

Bellcore will provide Telmex with technical support, including on-line access to the COMMON LANGUAGE data base that stores codes and other information about equipment.

Bellcore is a leading provider of communications software and consulting services based on world-class research. Bellcore creates the business solutions that make information technology work for telecommunications carriers, businesses and governments worldwide.

COMMON LANGUAGE codes evolved from earlier non-computerized codes used by individual departments of telephone companies for keeping records. At that time, there were a myriad of codes, each only understood by a small group of people.

More recently, computerized operations systems for inventory and record keeping have required telephone companies to use universal naming conventions. As the telecommunications industry grew and diversified, a consistent naming scheme became increasingly crucial for identifying all the parts -- or entities -- that make up the telephone network.

To make this identification process as easy as possible, COMMON LANGUAGE products are organized into sets of codes including:

- CLLI(R) -- The most widely used of all the codes, CLLI codes describe locations (sites) ranging from earth satellite stations, to manholes, to Customer Premises Equipment. There are more than one million codes and records developed to describe these sites. A CLLI building code format might look like this one in Rome: "ROMAITBK. " "ROMAIT" tells us the building is in Rome, Italy, while "BK" indicates a type of switching office.

- CLEI(R) -- Classifies equipment inventory and investment. By identifying the specific form, fit and function of equipment items, CLEI codes provide the technical base for tracking investment and depreciation information. The 10-character CLEI codes are used in bar code labels attached to telephone company equipment. Using a hand-held scanner to read the labels, companies use CLEI codes to help maintain tight inventory controls. This data is also used in computer systems for circuit design and layout, network provisioning and planning, maintenance operations and forecasting

- CLFI(R) codes are used to identify cable, fiber, analog and digital carriers and radio transmission facilities.

- CLCI(R)-MSG codes provide a naming scheme for message trunk circuits.

- CLCI-SS codes are used to identify special service circuits that are dedicated and billed to a particular customer. -0- CLLI, CLEI, CLCI and CLFI are trademarks of Bellcore

CONTACT: Bellcore

Cynthia Lucenius, 201/740-6468

or

Telmex

Freddy Roman Medina, 525 222 55 28