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CIENA DRIVES STANDARDS-BASED NETWORKING THROUGH FOUR LEADING INDUSTRY DEMONSTRATIONS

Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN) today announced its role in four major industry demonstrations. In conjunction with SUPERCOMM 2004, June 22-24 in Chicago, Ciena is participating in multi-vendor, multi-service demonstrations with Isocore, the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance (MFA), the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) and the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) to help drive industry standards and interoperability in creating the most efficient network for delivering high-value services from Core to Door™.

“Ciena is not merely participating in these four demonstrations – we’re playing a leading role with each of these organizations to drive standards-based interoperability across all geographies and all portions of the network,” said Steve Alexander, chief technology officer at Ciena. “Ultimately, this kind of industry cooperation helps our customers to build more profitable service models, and that objective directly supports our company’s evolution to a leading provider of intelligent service creation and delivery solutions for a new generation of revenue-rich services.”

Isocore IP-Optical Integration Test Program (Booth #11142)
Ciena is demonstrating its leadership in IP/MPLS and optical control plane integration for automated service delivery through the IP-Optical Integration Test Program by Isocore, a leading technology validation lab in next-generation IP and optical networking. Supporting Isocore Internetworking Lab IP-Optical Integration testing event in March, the program will be showcased in a live public demonstration at Isocore’s SuperTech Demonstration Network at SUPERCOMM.

In the demo, Ciena’s CoreDirector® switching system participates in an intelligent optical core network for IP/MPLS routers from leading vendors of routers, switching and ADM equipment. Employing Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) for signaling and routing, CoreDirector shares network topology information with the various vendor products to drive the automated creation and teardown of connections across the network.

As service providers continue to focus on ways to increase revenue and eliminate costs from their networks, this demonstration validates the effectiveness of an intelligent optical core that is integrated with the IP/MPLS domain to provide the automated operations, administration, maintenance and provisioning (OAM&P) capabilities provided in the optical domain today.

Ciena’s optical control plane technologies fully automate discovery and inventory of network resources, service route computation and resource activation during service establishment. This allows service providers to establish service connections without human intervention, resulting in services being established more rapidly, at a lower cost and with fewer connection errors. Ciena’s optical control plane capabilities have been in service in some of the world’s largest backbone networks.

“The integration of IP/MPLS and optical control plane technologies facilitate the self-management of operations across both the data and optical layers, enabling true end-to-end flow-through service provisioning and connection management over a converged network,” said Tom Mock, senior vice president of strategic planning at Ciena. “We believe that Ciena’s participation in Isocore and our success in the demonstration provide an important milestone in delivering solutions for converged networks that enhance revenue opportunities while decreasing network costs.”

MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance SUPERDemo (Booth #21439)
The MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance SUPERDemo is a two-stage multi-vendor interoperability event showcasing the flexibility of MPLS technology. The participants are engaged in a variety of scenarios to test the capabilities of Hierarchical Virtual Private LAN Service (H-VPLS), Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) capabilities of MPLS networks including Label Switched Path (LSP) Ping, ATM-MPLS interworking and Layer 2 (Martini/PWE3-based Ethernet, Frame Relay and ATM pseudowires) and Layer 3 VPNs. The live demonstration can be viewed at the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance booth #21439 – Hall A at SUPERCOMM 2004 at Chicago’s McCormick Place.

Ciena’s DN 7000 Series Multiservice Edge Switching Platform successfully demonstrates interoperability of Layer 2-based pseudowires across an MPLS network, as well as MPLS-based OAM capabilities. The DN 7100™ and DN 7050™ MPLS edge products interoperate using OSPF, OSPF-TE and RSVP-TE and utilize Any Service Any Port multiservice processing and interface hardware for combined ATM, Packet over SONET/SDH (POS) and Ethernet services. Also as part of the SUPERDemo, Ciena’s DN platform demonstrates the first-ever public interoperability of the ATM Forum’s ATM-MPLS Network Interworking Version 1.0 standard for the tunneling of PNNI and S-PVC connection setup through a converged MPLS-based backbone. Ciena is demonstrating this interoperability with Alcatel. As carriers evolve their network architectures to converged IP/MPLS-based backbones, the ability to interwork with existing deployed technologies is critical. Carriers can now migrate their existing Frame Relay and ATM services to MPLS without significant new investment in equipment or provisioning systems.

The MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance is an international industry organization that is advancing the recognition and acceptance of MPLS and Frame Relay technologies in the global telecom industry. For more information on the Alliance and the SUPERDemo visit: http://www.mplsforum.org/.

Metro Ethernet Forum SUPERDemo (Booth #20736)
Through its participation in this year’s multi-vendor live demonstration of the MEF’s specifications for carrier-class metro Ethernet services, Ciena is helping to establish more profitable service models for carriers, cable operators and enterprises by driving down costs and enabling value-add services.

The technical interoperability demonstration will feature the first ratified MEF specifications, which form a standards-based foundation on which carriers and cable operators can deploy metro Ethernet services. Ciena and other vendors will actively demonstrate implementation of six different MEF Technology Focus Areas, including Metro Ethernet Network Protection, Ethernet UNI (User Network Interface), Ethernet Services, Circuit Emulation over Ethernet, Ethernet Traffic Management, and Test and Service Assurance.

Specifically, Ciena’s CN 2300™ and CN 4300™ will be demonstrating their implementation of the MEF Ethernet UNI with other SUPERDemo participants.

OIF World Interoperability Demo (Booth #20334)
Multiple Ciena solutions are participating in the OIF World Interoperability Demo, the industry’s first international joint-carrier, multi-vendor optical networking interoperability demonstration, which will be showcased at SUPERCOMM 2004. The event, conducted simultaneously in China, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, will highlight network interoperable solutions among the participating vendors employing OIF implementation agreements in a multi-carrier environment.

Ciena, along with other participating supplier and carrier companies, is conducting interoperability testing of Ethernet over SONET/SDH services and dynamic optical networking services. Based on ITU-T standards for Ethernet service adaptation, the Ethernet over SONET/SDH services testing will include the Generic Framing Procedure (GFP), Virtual Concatenation (VCAT), and the Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS). The dynamic optical networking interoperability testing will be based on OIF implementation agreements for UNI 1.0 release 2 and E-NNI, and will include testing of both the control and data plane. These implementation agreements are based on the ITU’s requirements for Automatically Switched Optical Networks (ASON).

These standards-based capabilities are shaping next-generation networks to help speed the deployment of interoperable networks on a global scale, resulting in delivery of new revenue-generating services end-to-end across geographies and vendors.

Ciena is participating simultaneously in five carrier labs, employing CoreDirector and the CN 2600™ Multiservice Edge Aggregator (formerly known as ONLINE Edge) to enable end-to-end automation of next-generation packet-aware services regardless of control plane implementation.

“The World Interoperability Demo represents a compelling testament to both the interest that carriers are showing in UNI and E-NNI as well as the confidence that the vendors have in their implementations,” said Joe Berthold, president of the OIF and vice president of network architecture at Ciena. “The success of the demonstration validates the work of the OIF in promoting carrier deployment of integrated data and optical network technologies and highlights an industry milestone in multi carrier participation and contribution in building intelligent optical networks.”

An overview of the event will be on display June 22-24 at SUPERCOMM 2004 in Chicago, OIF Booth #20334 in Hall A. Additional information can be found at http://www.oiforum.com/.