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City of Houston Deploys Alvarion® 4G Wireless Broadband Network for Advanced Municipal Services
Innovative Smart City project helps local government enhance quality of life for residents, enabling them to be safer, well-informed and consistently connected

Washington, D.C.,  March 29,  2011 — Alvarion Ltd. (NASDAQ: ALVR), the world’s leading provider of 4G networks in the Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) market, today announced the deployment of a 4G municipal network with the City of Houston. The City of Houston’s Smart City project is a prime illustration of the fast-growing global movement towards transforming urban life with communications infrastructure. Alvarion’s 4G wireless broadband network is enabling the City of Houston’s local government to offer advanced municipal services, such as enhanced public safety and traffic optimization solutions, and consistent access to information. The Smart City project is also meeting the municipality’s need for a more efficient and cost-effective management of the city’s day-to-day operations. 

Alvarion and the City of Houston have worked closely to design a 4G wireless broadband network that meets the city’s needs. The major benefits of the new wireless broadband network indicated by the City of Houston include:
  • Improving Public Service
    • Improving traffic safety and congestion throughout the city through remote control of 2500 traffic intersections and 1500 school zone flashers
    • Improving customer service and reducing cost by connecting the City’s mobile AMR system to the WiMAX network to remotely monitor 500,000 water meter accounts
  • Reducing Costs
    • Reducing multi-million dollar annual commercial T1 costs by replacing these connections with WiMAX service at over 500 city facilities (i.e., water/wastewater plants, maintenance, libraries, etc.)    
    • Affordably expanding connectivity service to facilities and operations (i.e., SCADA, video surveillance, parking pay stations, etc.)
  • Serving the Public Good
    • Making excess bandwidth available to enable free Internet service  for more than 300,000 residents in underserved, underprivileged communities (i.e., public computer centers for children, where children can get free Internet access and have a safe environment to stay and learn; 20 centers are already operating today)
"We realized the most cost-effective way to introduce a city-wide network was to go with a high-performance wireless solution that offers huge savings on infrastructure expenses and can be easily and remotely managed to reduce operational costs. This way, we can gradually roll out advanced residential services, such as water utility management, in a way that would genuinely improve residential life in the city, without necessarily raising the cost of living," said Brian Anderson, Senior Consultant and Program Director, City of Houston Wireless Broadband Initiative. "We turned to Alvarion for the company’s broad portfolio of 4G wireless broadband solutions, which meet the city’s goals of providing wireless access to a large area of residents and for municipal use."

Alvarion’s solutions are instrumental in a variety of city applications that enable significant operational advantages for the city. Through Alvarion’s multi-frequency portfolio including BreezeNET® B point-to-point and BreezeMAX® Extreme 3650 point-to-multipoint products, the city is currently introducing traffic control in more than 3,500 locations throughout the city. City of Houston also plans to connect 400 water utility locations with the 4G network, covering an area of approximately 640 square miles.

This visionary project was further endorsed by its recognition by The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) Board of Directors as the 2010 Community Broadband Wireless Network of the Year for extensive effort and creativity in designing and deploying a wireless network to serve institutional and public needs.

"High-performance was a major priority in selecting the solution that would best meet our current and future needs,"commented Justin Ewald, Chief Wireless Broadband Network Engineer with the City of Houston. "Alvarion’s 3.65 GHz solution enables us to deploy a smaller number of base stations for increased coverage, while maintaining optimal Quality of Service throughout the network. The fact that our IT operational team now has the ability to maintain and tweak the network anytime and in line with our changing needs, from a central location, makes this a win-win situation for both our residents and our employees."

"Smart City projects are a hugely gratifying market sector for us as a technology provider. Over the years we’ve been following the needs of our municipal and government customers and our solutions in this field are state-of-the-art," said Eran Gorev, president and CEO of Alvarion. "We’ve learned how to help cities offer their residents fundamental and advanced services such as connectivity hotspots, personal security and online municipal services, while allowing them to control costs."

About Alvarion 
Alvarion (NASDAQ:ALVR) is a global 4G communications leader with the industry’s most extensive customer base, including hundreds of commercial 4G deployments. Alvarion’s industry leading network solutions for broadband wireless technologies WiMAX, TD-LTE and WiFi, enable broadband applications for service providers and enterprises covering a variety of industries such as mobile broadband, residential and business broadband, utilities, municipalities and public safety agencies. Through an open network strategy, superior IP and OFDMA know-how, and ability to deploy large scale end-to-end turnkey networks, Alvarion is delivering the true 4G broadband experience today (www.alvarion.com)

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on the current expectations or beliefs of Alvarion’s management and are subject to a number of factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. The following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements: potential impact on our business of the current global recession, the inability of our customers to obtain credit to purchase our products as a result of global credit market conditions, the failure to fund projects under the U.S. broadband stimulus program, continued delays in 4G license allocation in certain countries; the failure of the products for the 4G  market to develop as anticipated;, Alvarion’s inability to capture market share in the expected growth of the 4G market as anticipated, due to, among other things, competitive reasons or failure to execute in our sales, marketing or manufacturing objectives; the failure of the Alvarion’s strategic initiatives to enable Alvarion to more effectively capitalize on market opportunities as anticipated;  inability to further identify, develop and achieve success for new products, services and technologies; increased competition and its effect on pricing, spending, third-party relationships and revenues; as well as the inability to establish and maintain relationships with commerce, advertising, marketing, and technology providers and other risks detailed from time to time in the Company’s 20-F Annual Report Risk Factors section as well as in other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Information set forth in this press release pertaining to third parties has not been independently verified by Alvarion and is based solely on publicly available information or on information provided to Alvarion by such third parties for inclusion in this press release. The web sites appearing in this press release are not and will not be included or incorporated by reference in any filing made by Alvarion with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which this press release will be a part of.

 
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