Toronto, Canada December 4, 2001

Toronto, December 4, 2001 - Consultronics today announces that it has been selected as the winner in a competitive bid process involving three short-listed candidates to provide its NQMSplus (Network Monitoring Quality System) to CANTV, the leading Venezuelan telecommunications provider.

The system will replace CANTV's existing MCOR Quality Monitoring System with a modern client-server based solution. The NQMSplus system provides network quality visibility that will ensure an optimum Quality of Service to CANTV's customers, thus significantly enhancing its capabilities to remain Venezuela's dominant telecommunications services provider in the new deregulated market established on January 1, 2001.

The new Consultronics' system provides CANTV with improved measurement and administrative capabilities. NQMSplus' versatility addresses not only CANTV's present needs based on their existing analog and mostly digital infrastructure, but also the future evolution of their networks.

The NQMSplus system, in the first phase of this turnkey multi-phased project, will be installed by Consultronics, and its local partner Equilab, in 140 exchange sites hubbed in Caracas. In addition, 40 portable units will cover additional sites for short or long periods as dictated by CANTV's operations. The system will be expanded in three additional phases in order to cover CANTV's entire network. The powerful server and the systems' state of the art architecture will allow CANTV to make up to 1.5 million test calls per month. A sophisticated relational database, based on Oracle's powerful RDBMS, combined with a RAID 5 disk array, ensures continuous, easy and reliable access to the test data and reports generated by the NQMS system.

The NQMSplus system will interface the existing MCOR system, which will be phased out gradually during the course of the phased NQMSplus implementation.

NQMSplus provides end-to-end QoS (Quality of Service) certification. Through predetermined test thresholds that match defined contractual terms, the monitoring system ensures that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are being upheld. NQMSplus provides for timely reactions in the event of malfunctions. Furthermore, the system's predictive capabilities prevent failures before they occur. It provides a warning when the network resources are reaching their limits. The NQMSplus distributed architecture, supported by a robust UNIX server platform combined with intelligent test-heads keep the need for overhead communications to a minimum.

NQMSplus is a very sophisticated and user-friendly system. Its easy-to-use GUI allows users to program and manage the system activities with a minimum of training. Its scheduling and reporting tools allow for an almost "automatic pilot" operation of the system. NQMSplus issues alarms and trouble tickets. The alarm system has the capability to "follow" users or their alternates, should they be away from their workstation, through Internet, pager, fax, and other forms of telecom messaging.

Among other testing capabilities, the system offers a voice quality testing capability that provides the ITU's MOS (Mean Opinion Score) measurements of speech and conversation quality. NQMS systems are the only automatic tool that can ensure the voice quality (VoIP) over wired and wireless networks. The system also offers modem and fax transmission quality measurements, thus assuring the adequacy of the networks to support data transmission.