Private company

Crescent (Belgian company)

Logo: option.com3

Belgian technology company

Option is a publicly quoted technology company, headquartered in Leuven, Belgium. Option specializes in the design, development, production and commercialization of broadband Wireless technology devices. Option has been awarded Ernst & Young's ‘Company of the Year’ award for 2005.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

1986Founded1
Option HQ 2
Photo: Kvdh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons5

Option is a publicly quoted technology company, headquartered in Leuven, Belgium. Option specializes in the design, development, production and commercialization of broadband Wireless technology devices. Option has been awarded Ernst & Young's ‘Company of the Year’ award for 2005.2

Products and brands

  • PC Card

Listed on Wikidata.1

Remarkable was the GlobeTrotter Fusion+ card which was the first to integrate HSDPA/UMTS/EDGE/Wi-Fi technologies on a single data card.

Option was the worldwide market leader in the wireless broadband niche (other market contestants are either significantly smaller, or do not consider wireless broadband a core business – for example NEC Corporation), and could benefit from high margins across the whole product range. Intentions from a new Intel-Nokia partnership which would deteriorate Option's market share were short-lived and quickly dropped, proving Option's leadership as well as high entry-to-market barriers even for large corporations. Most production took place at Jabil in Bergamo, Italy, while Celestica in Kladno, Czech Republic, provides additional capacity. Nowadays, all manufacturing of devices is done in Wuxi, China. The products were marked as having been designed in Leuven, but actually are refurbished and labelled in Ireland.

From Wikipedia’s article on Crescent (Belgian company), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4

Timeline

  1. 1986Founded Founded1

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5