VSNL Chooses Ciena

LINTHICUM, Md. -- Ciena®Corporation (NASDAQ:CIEN), the network specialist, today announced that VSNL, a leading communications solutions provider and member of the US $29 billion Tata Group, has deployed Ciena's CoreDirector®Multiservice Optical Switches to create the first nationwide intelligent optical mesh network in India. Fully operational today with live customer traffic, the new network enables VSNL to offer its customers maximum network reliability and service agility using automated service restoration and provisioning. The new network will also be used by Tata Teleservices (TTSL), one of India's premier mobile and fixed service providers.

As a leading international communications provider in one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world, where teledensity is expected to more than double by the end of 2008*, VSNL's new backbone network features a fully-meshed architecture throughout India. The mesh design enables the network to survive multiple failures caused by either natural disasters or man-made issues, such as accidental fiber cuts. Based on CoreDirector's industry-leading, standards-based control plane, VSNL's mesh network automatically routes traffic around network failures based on its real-time knowledge of the network's available bandwidth and ability to find the best alternate routes. Based on this network intelligence, Ciena's CoreDirector restores traffic within milliseconds, instead of the hours or days typically involved in manual restorations.

"By delivering the first, true nationwide mesh network in India, we are offering our customers the industry's highest level of reliability to support their mission-critical traffic," said Matthew Ma, vice president, Ethernet and Transmission Engineering, VSNL. "More importantly, based on the intelligent, automated provisioning and multiservice capabilities of the network, we can quickly address customer requests for increased speeds or new services with the simplicity of remote, point-and-click provisioning. Overall, this architecture enables us to deliver better overall customer service in a telecom market that is expected to grow more than 20 percent by 2009.**"

Ciena Corp. (NYSE: CIEN)