Internet2 and Ciena announced in October 2006 a partnership to deploy Ciena’s CoreDirector® Multiservice Switch in Internet2's new nationwide advanced research and education network. Ciena also becomes an Internet2 Corporate Partner, the highest level partnership offered, enhancing its relationship with Internet2 to further advance the exploration and development of next-generation optical switching technology.

Ciena also began participation in Internet2’s Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) project, a national scale network test bed developed in 2004 by a group of collaborators, which includes corporate members, network researchers, and network engineers, to investigate next-generation scalable architectures. The HOPI project has served as a model for Internet2’s new network infrastructure and deployment.