Janet Deploys Ciena 40G

LONDON and LINTHICUM, Md. -- Ciena®Corporation (NASDAQ:CIEN), the network specialist, today announced that JANET(UK) has successfully delivered its first 40 Gbps service in a production environment across JANET, the UK's national research and education network, using the new 40 Gbps capabilities of Ciena's CoreStream®Agility Optical Transport System. This is the first time that a national research and education network (NREN) in Europe has deployed a true 40 Gbps signal across a single optical wavelength to carry live production traffic between sites.

The Ciena-enabled 40 Gbps service was delivered across a dedicated optical fiber link connecting the Canary Wharf and Kings Cross points of presence (PoP) in London, one of the busiest parts of the JANET network.

Funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), JANET provides a highly robust and scalable UK-wide optical network to support the diverse requirements of a user base of 18 million, including research institutes, universities, further education and primary and secondary schools. Ciena's CoreStream Agility platform forms the foundation of the JANET backbone transmission infrastructure to deliver high-speed connectivity for end-users. Additionally, Ciena's FlexSelect(TM)CN 4200(TM)Advanced Services Platform connects 19 UK regional networks to the JANET backbone. Both Ciena solutions offer a seamless upgrade to 40 Gbps of capacity per wavelength as needed.

With the first 40 Gbps connectivity now in service between two PoPs, JANET plans to migrate its entire CoreStream Agility-based transport infrastructure to 40 Gbps interfaces during the course of 2008, dependent on network traffic growth. As Ciena's solution enables new 40 Gbps wavelengths to be intermixed with existing 10 Gbps wavelengths on the same fiber system, JANET will be able to migrate seamlessly to 40 Gbps, without interruption to the existing 10 Gbps network or the need to build a separate, standalone network.

Jeremy Sharp, JANET Head of Strategic Technologies, said: "With the support of our technology partners such as Ciena, we are very confident that the migration to 40 Gbps will be successful. By increasing single wavelength capacity, we are able to scale the JANET network whilst continuing to offer a very high quality service to the education and research community."

JANET