Alcatel awarded USD-250-million contract for the Dubai Metro Project

MHI is part of the DURL Consortium - Dubai Rapid Link -, headed by MHI, which is in charge of the Dubai Light Rail Transit Project for the Municipality.

With a goal of becoming the region's prime business and leisure destination, this project enables Dubai to overcome severe traffic congestion issues. Municipality of Dubai's requirement is to move passengers efficiently and reliably with advanced, yet proven, train control technology, and to ensure real-time communication to passengers in stations and on-board. The objective of the new metro, consisting initially of two lines and scheduled to go into revenue service in 2009, is a 16,000 people per hour per direction capacity for the Red Line and 7,400 for the Green Line, by 2015. When completed, at a total of over 70 km, this will become the longest driverless metro in the world.

The Dubai Municipality will benefit from low operating and maintenance costs, optimal life cycle costs and proven driverless technology inherent with Alcatel's SelTrac® technology. The train control solution incorporates moving-block technology, pioneered by Alcatel, which eliminates the need for signals on tracks while providing safe, close headway of shorter trains for an optimized service frequency. Integrated, Alcatel's NetTrac central control system facilitates operator flexibility to add or delete trains and overcomes problem occurrences. Alcatel will deliver, through its SelTrac S40 communications-based train control system, fully automated operation, as proven in major cities such as New-York, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Ankara, Kuala Lumpur, and others, for over twenty years.

The Dubai Municipality and their passengers will also take advantage of Alcatel's fully integrated communications solution, which includes a digital and wireless network, a security solution including on-board video surveillance and access control, voice system, digital radio network, passenger information, public address, time distribution, and an integrated control center. Alcatel will provide its total solution on a turnkey basis with a complete set of services including design, integration, installation, testing and commissioning.

"This is a very significant win for Alcatel. We are very proud to see our urban rail solutions entering the Middle East market to equip the state-of-the-art Dubai Metro. And we are pleased to have succeeded again with MHI, which facilitates our business growth opportunities. The Dubai Metro project is one of the most sophisticated high-end solutions developed in rail transport. It further leverages our expertise in serving the transportation industry and confirms our worldwide leading position in the supply of fully automated train control and communications solutions" said Olivier Houssin, President of Alcatel's private communications activities.