Ciena's 4200 Gets Coherent

LINTHICUM, Md. -- Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN), the network specialist, today announced the integration of the company’s market-leading 40G coherent technology on its CN 4200® RS FlexSelect® Advanced Services Platform to address customer demand for higher capacity metro and regional networks, managed services and enterprise applications. The move underscores the company’s commitment to accelerating the integration and delivery of advanced technology from the recently acquired Nortel* Metro Ethernet Networks assets across its product portfolio and to its installed base.

Ciena’s global footprint of CN 4200 customers includes numerous network operators for metro and regional infrastructures, managed service providers as well as government and enterprise users. In response to their need for increased network capacity due to unprecedented traffic growth, service requirements and potential fiber exhaustion, the company is integrating its native 40G coherent and Adaptive Optical Engine technology into a new module for the CN 4200 RS chassis. Customers can leverage the solution’s advanced signal processing technologies, which use Dual Polarization Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (DP QPSK) modulation, coherent detection and electronic dispersion compensation to transmit four times as much information across existing 10G networks. These advanced optical technologies, which Ciena is the first and only to commercialize to date, allow 40 Gbps transmission even over impaired fiber that cannot be used for 10Gbps without the need for separate optical Chromatic Dispersion (CD) and Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) compensators. With an in-service upgrade, existing CN 4200 customers can obtain a four-fold increase in capacity with existing ROADM schemes, enhancing equipment scalability and avoiding network re-design.

“After closing the acquisition of Nortel’s MEN assets in March, Ciena acted quickly to define its organizational structure and product portfolio, rallying around ground-breaking coherent 40G and 100G technology,” said Ron Kline, Principal Analyst Network Infrastructure at Ovum. “Now, after a little more than a month, the company has begun making solid progress on successfully integrating that coherent technology into the CN 4200 and CoreStream platforms, which significantly widens Ciena’s addressable market to include the sizeable embedded base of its network elements.”

Ciena Corp. (NYSE: CIEN)