Alcatel Standard Electrica SA of Spain has quietly signed an agreement with the Polish telecommunications company ZWUT to supply and install a minimum of 700,000 lines of System 12 telephone exchanges between next year and 1992. The exchanges will be of the 12PC type, digital exchanges that are designed to interwork with electromechanical ones.
Engineers from both Spain and Poland have been working together in the last few months to adapt the exchanges to the Polish telephone network. The agreement which includes technical maintenance and training, could lead to further agreements between Alcatel and ZWUT under which the Spanish company would install 1m digital lines in Poland a year. It is not clear how the agreement has been squared with CoCom, the Free World co ordinating committee in Paris which decrees what Western technology may be transferred to the Comecon countries. CoCom is expected to lift the embargo on digital telephone exchanges in October, but has not done so yet. GEC Plessey Telecommunications says that it is talking about System X in a number of Comecon countries but indicates that it won’t say anything about agreements until CoCom delivers its ruling. That sounds like poor public relations: if the UK firm has any agreements comparable with the one announced by Standard Electrica, it should be trumpeting them.
