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Intermedia Chooses CIENA's DWDM Optical Transport Equipment for Fiber Optic Network

CIENA Awarded Two-Year Contract

Ciena Corporation (Nasdaq: CIEN) today announced that Intermedia Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: ICIX) has chosen Ciena's MultiWave Sentry(TM) dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical transport system for deployment in Intermedia's fiber optic network. Additional terms of the two-year contract were not disclosed.

``The open architecture of Ciena's optical networking products allows Intermedia to add new technology to our network, which translates into new services for our customers,'' said Richard Marchant, Intermedia's senior vice president of engineering. ``Other key factors in our decision were Ciena's experience in optical networking and the company's tremendous track record in deploying commercial systems in carrier networks across the world.''

According to Patrick Nettles, Ciena's president and chief executive officer, ``Intermedia's decision to deploy open architecture optical networking systems demonstrates its focus on building a network that has the capability to scale and grow as fast as business dictates. We are very pleased to be supplying equipment to one of the innovative new market leaders.''

With deployment of Ciena's DWDM equipment, Intermedia expects to enhance its service delivery intervals to meet both data and voice service growth demands, and by using Ciena's DirectConnect feature Intermedia will streamline the network topology by eliminating unnecessary traditional SONET multiplexers and regenerators as the long-haul network is optimized for data-centric solutions.

Intermedia is deploying an optical layer infrastructure capable of supporting 40 OC-48 channels over a single pair of fibers, equating to capacity of 100 gigabytes per second. This same infrastructure also provides Intermedia the added flexibility to upgrade and scale the system to support 96 channels of OC-48, or 240 gigabytes per second in the future.