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Ciena’s CoreDirector Multiservice Optical Switch Deployed by Cox Communications in San Diego

Fourth largest MSO in the U.S. avoids costly headend expansion by using CoreDirector to interconnect two metro rings

Ciena Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN), the network specialist, today announced that Cox Communications, a multi-service broadband communications and entertainment company with more than six million total residential and commercial customers, has deployed Ciena’s CoreDirector® Multiservice Optical Switches in the super headend of its San Diego network to interconnect two metro rings, each transporting multiple 10 Gbps circuits over DWDM.

To interconnect the rings, Cox faced the cost and complexity of purchasing multiple switching and cross-connect products, as well as an expansion of its super headend building to accommodate the new equipment. Instead, Ciena’s CoreDirector enabled Cox to remove several bays of legacy cross-connect equipment and associated patch cables, eliminated the need to expand the building, and reduced power consumption. CoreDirector also gives Cox 640 Gbps of switching capacity in a single bay to keep pace with growing demand for triple play and commercial services while maximizing interfaces for revenue generation based on the platform’s internal ring interconnection.

“Our growing capacity requirements made the ring interconnection a natural decision point for our core metro infrastructure. After evaluating the options, CoreDirector clearly delivered the best solution from all perspectives – cost, functionality, performance and operational simplicity,” said David Vaughn, engineering manager for Cox San Diego. “More importantly, CoreDirector provides SONET and Ethernet services flexibility and intelligent automation for load balancing, provisioning and cross-connecting traffic between the two rings.”

A key element of Ciena’s FlexSelect™ Architecture and the global market leader in optical switching, CoreDirector is a multiservice, multiprotocol optical switching system that consolidates the functionality of a multiservice provisioning platform, digital cross-connect and Ethernet switch into a single, high-capacity intelligent switching system that can reduce network operator capex by as much as 65 percent and opex by as much as 85 percent. The embedded intelligence of CoreDirector’s FlexSelect OS standards-based optical control plane provides 99.9999 percent reliability and real-time resource inventory discovery, database synchronization, intelligent mapping of service requests to network resources and fully-automated activation and deactivation of network resources.

“Cox was the first MSO to deploy CoreDirector, which not only underscores the growing applications for optical switching outside of traditional markets, but also further highlights the cable industry’s increasing focus on intelligent, ultra-reliable platforms with software-based automation,” said Mike Aquino, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Ciena. “With this deployment, CoreDirector joins Ciena’s CN 4200™ FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform and other optical Ethernet platforms with integrated management by Ciena’s ON-Center® Network and Service Management Suite in several Cox regions supporting a variety of residential and commercial services.”

Ciena is a leader in optical Ethernet switching and transport for cable networks based on multi-system and operator-wide deployments with MSOs worldwide, including ARMSTRONG Cable, Buckeye CableSystem, Cablevision, Cox Communications, J:COM and others. Ciena platforms are the backbone of networks passing more than 22 million homes and businesses and provide practical solutions for converging and transitioning networks to high-performance Ethernet for broadcast video distribution, VOD, CMTS backhaul of VoIP and high speed data, storage extension and commercial services.