What's a lonely Ciena box doing in Level 3's New York POP?

January 25, 2001

1 Min Read
Ciena Closes in on Level 3

Is Ciena Corp. (Nasdaq: CIEN) set to close a whopper of a deal with Level 3 Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: LVLT)? It certainly looks that way.

Level 3 recently installed a Ciena CoreDirector switch at its New York City POP, Light Reading editors learned during a tour of the facility this week. The switch was sitting in an empty row of telecom bays, ready for action.

One of the employees on the site volunteered that they'd soon be filling up the rest of the bays with CoreDirectors. The only other optical gear in the vicinity consisted of Fujitsu Sonet gear.

“We don’t comment on deals until they are officially announced,” says Cathy Sattem, a media relations specialist with Level 3.

Ciena had a little bit more to say:
Another Light Reading source confirmed that Level 3 is in the latter stages of evaluating Ciena's CoreDirector, and that the product is the frontrunner among Optical-Electrical-Optical (OEO) DWDM switches. It would be used to redirect DWDM traffic at metropolitan POPs onto the proper cross-country backbone links.

Level 3 is considered a tier one service provider, representing a trophy customer. The company has nearly 50 POPs, according to the network map available on its Web site Network Map, which would make the contract sizable.

Who might the deal hurt? It would not be the best of news for Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE/Toronto: NT), Sycamore Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: SCMR), and Tellium Inc., who are targeting the same market.

--R. Scott Raynovich, executive editor, and Matt Malina, research associate, Light Reading http://www.lightreading.com

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