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CIENA Corporation Announces Initial Public Offering of Common Stock

Ciena Corporation announced today that it has completed an initial public offering of common stock. The shares began trading today on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol CIEN. The offering was for 5,000,000 shares, which were sold at an initial public offering price of $23 per share.

Ciena Corporation ("Ciena" or the "Company") designs, manufactures and sells dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems for long distance fiberoptic telecommunications networks. Ciena’s DWDM solution, the MultiWaveTM1600 system, alleviates bandwidth capacity constraints in high traffic fiberoptic routes without requiring the installation of new fiber. In addition, the MultiWaveTM 1600 system enables flexible provisioning of additional bandwidth without requiring an upgrade of existing network transmission equipment.

The MultiWaveTM 1600 system can increase the carrying capacity of a single optical fiber 16 fold by allowing simultaneous transmission of up to 16 optical channels per fiber. This permits fiber currently carrying signals at transmission speeds of up to 2.5 gigabits per second ("Gb/s") to carry up to

40 Gb/s. Ciena’s MultiWaveTM 1600 system includes optical transmission terminals, optical amplifiers and network management software. Ciena’s system is designed with an open architecture that allows the MultiWaveTM 1600 system to interoperate with the broad range of transmission speeds and signal formats that comprise carriers’ existing fiberoptic transmission systems.

The Company believes it is a worldwide market leader in field deployment of open architecture DWDM systems. Ciena’s MultiWaveTM 1600 system was introduced into field trials in the long distance networks of Sprint in May 1996 and WorldCom in August 1996. The MultiWaveTM 1600 system began carrying live traffic in the Sprint network in October 1996, and the field trial in the WorldCom network was successfully completed in December 1996.

The Company has a three-year non-exclusive supply agreement with Sprint which expires in December 1998 and a supply agreement with WorldCom which, subject to certain conditions, is exclusive through December 1997. It also has an agreement to supply Teleway Japan Corporation with the Company’s MultiWaveTM 1600 system. Through October 31, 1996, the Company recorded $54.8 million in revenue, all of which was derived from sales of the MultiWaveTM 1600 system to Sprint. The Company is actively seeking additional customers among other long distance carriers in the worldwide telecommunications market.

A copy of a written prospectus can be obtained from Goldman, Sachs & Co., 85 Broad Street, New York, New York 10004. The initial public offering was co-managed in the U.S. by Alex. Brown & Sons Incorporated, Wessels, Arnold & Henderson, L.L.C. and William K. Woodruff & Company Incorporated.