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Digital Teleport Awards $13 Million Deal to CIENA

Chooses MultiWave 4000 for Network Expansion

Ciena Corporation [NASDAQ: CIEN] today announced that it has been awarded a $13 million contract by Digital Teleport, Incorporated (DTI) to supply its MultiWave® 4000 dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) system for deployment in its network. Shipments to DTI will begin this month.

Ciena's MultiWave 4000 is the industry's first commercial 40-channel DWDM system. With its 50 GHz channel spacing, the MultiWave 4000 can be upgraded from 40 to 96 channels on a channel-by-channel basis providing unprecedented bandwidth scaleability.

DTI will deploy Ciena's MultiWave 4000 throughout its new network, which will eventually cover fourteen states in the mid-western United States. DTI previously installed Ciena's MultiWave 1600 in its first phase of constructing a three-cornered ring encompassing most of the state of Missouri.

"We chose Ciena's technology because it offered the highest-capacity DWDM currently available in the market," said Richard D. Weinstein, chief executive officer of Digital Teleport, Inc. "Also, Ciena offered an open-architecture platform which provides interoperability with the broad range of transmission speeds and signal formats used by other vendor's SONET equipment, a critical requirement for DTI as a carrier's carrier. The ability to scale to 96 channels was also key for our future business requirements," noted Weinstein.

"DTI's purchase of the MultiWave 4000 demonstrates its continued confidence in Ciena's equipment and the Company's field experience in DWDM systems," said Patrick Nettles, Ciena's president and chief executive officer. "It also strengthens our belief that DWDM is the most cost effective solution for scaleable transport today."

The MultiWave 4000 system is Ciena's latest addition to its family of long-haul optical transport solutions. 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.

Digital Teleport is a facilities-based provider of long-haul and local telecommunications services primarily to inter-exchange carriers and other communications entities on a wholesale basis as well as directly to business and governmental end users. Digital Teleport currently provides telecommunications services in Missouri and Arkansas and is expanding its fiber optic network to cover a 14-state region in the Midwest.