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CIENA INTRODUCES MULTIWAVE® 4000 SYSTEM

Scaleable DWDM from 40 to 96 Channels

Ciena Corporation (Nasdaq: CIEN) today announced it will begin shipments of its next generation dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) system for long-haul networks, the MultiWave® 4000. The MultiWave 4000 delivers the industry's first 40-channel DWDM system in commercial production and provides unprecedented scaleability with 50 Ghz channel spacing, another industry first. This allows the MultiWave 4000 to be upgraded from 40 to 96 channels on a channel-by-channel basis.

This scaleability is made possible by a unique optical architecture, utilizing 50 Ghz channel spacing. Ciena's in-fiber Bragg gratings expertise enables precise channel spacing half that of currently deployed commercial DWDM systems. As a result, Ciena's MultiWave 4000 allows service providers to economically increase network bandwidth by up to 96 times current capacity - by adding wavelengths, or channels, as network traffic demands.

In a separate announcement today, Ciena reached an agreement with Sprint Corporation to supply the MultiWave 4000, with deployment to begin next month. This follows successful factory acceptance testing of a fully populated, 40-channel, 100 Gb/s MultiWave 4000 DWDM system at Sprint's facilities in Burlingame, California.

"The MultiWave 4000 demonstrates the true potential of Ciena's unique MultiWave Technologiesä," said Steve Alexander, Ciena's vice president and chief technology officer. "MultiWave Technologies are the keys to Ciena's ability to develop, manufacture and deliver real solutions for real world networks. The industry has talked about moving channel spacing from 100 Ghz to the narrower 50 Ghz spacing, but Ciena is the first to deliver it."

"Increasing the number of channels in DWDM systems is only a part of the puzzle," states Steve Chaddick, Ciena's senior vice president of products and technologies. "Useful bandwidth has to be reliable and error free. Performance monitoring, robust network management, and standard, open optical interfaces are key enablers of the construction of optical networks with DWDM transport. MultiWave 4000 addresses all these needs and is a significant step in the evolution of broadband networks. DWDM networks are now a reality."

The MultiWave 4000 includes several of Ciena's innovative MultiWave Technologies such as SmartSpanä and WaveLockä. SmartSpan provides dynamic management of the optical layer including optical line amplifiers. It ensures reliability and performance by embedding software intelligence within each MultiWave component. WaveLock performs continuous frequency locking resulting in extremely high stability in all conditions, a critical capability as channel density increases.

Ciena's MultiWave 4000 is ideally suited for service providers' long-haul, dense route applications that require scaleable capacity. The system's open architecture enables carriers to mix SONET/SDH, ATM and IP traffic on a common optical network while eliminating the intervening synchronous layer in evolving data-centric ATM and IP networks.

Other features of the MultiWave 4000 include standard, inexpensive, short reach interfaces between the optical transport network and switching, routing or TDM platforms and the ability to scale in-service one channel at a time by simply adding channel modules to the span terminals. Optical add/drop multiplexers, Erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) and network management are also provided in the system.