LONDON and LINTHICUM, Md. -- Ciena® Corporation (Nasdaq: CIEN), the network specialist, today announced that Cox Communications, a multiservice broadband company with more than 6.7 million customers, including more than one million triple play customers, has certified Ciena’s CN 4200™ FlexSelect™ Advanced Services Platform for deployment in its metro and regional networks to support the aggregation and transport of residential voice, video and data services, as well as business services.

Based on the agreement, the CN 4200 has been deployed in several Cox regions to provide initial support for high-speed data and commercial services.

Ciena’s CN 4200 is the flagship product of Ciena’s FlexSelect Architecture, a standards-based, service-oriented approach to building next-generation network infrastructures. The CN 4200 is a multiservice transport and aggregation platform capable of on-demand support for any transport protocol—including SONET/SDH, Ethernet/GbE/10GbE, storage (Fibre Channel, FICON, ESCON) or video—at any speed on any available port using the industry's first universal line card with individual user-programmable ports.

“Part of our on-going strategy is to shift away from service-specific equipment and evolve to a converged, multiservice network that can adapt to the changing demands from residential and business customers over time,” said Darryl Ladd, director of network architecture for Cox Communications. “With the CN 4200, we can reduce our wavelength utilization and have a single line card delivering SONET, Gigabit Ethernet and storage services on different reprogrammable ports – instead of needing three different line cards or network devices – all of which combine to bring a new level of service flexibility and investment protection to our network.”

Ciena Corp. (NYSE: CIEN)