CenturyLink successfully delivers terabit speeds in central Florida field trial

MONROE, La. and HANOVER, Md., Feb. 23, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- CenturyLink, Inc. (NYSE: CTL) and Ciena Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN) today announced that CenturyLink, the third largest telecommunications company in the U.S., has successfully delivered superchannel transmission speeds of one terabit per second (1 Tb/s) on a portion of its fiber network in central Florida.

CenturyLink conducted the live field test earlier this month on its existing network using Ciena's 6500 packet-optical platform equipped with WaveLogic 3 16QAM-based coherent optics and Flexible Grid photonic layer. The terabit superchannel, composed of five 200 Gbps wavelengths closely packed together, more than doubled the network's traffic carrying capacity during the trial, demonstrating the scalability and efficiency of CenturyLink's network.

"This 1 terabit per second trial complements the work we are doing to transform our network and prepares us to meet our customers' growing bandwidth needs now and into the future," said James Feger, vice president, CenturyLink network strategy and development. "Being able to quickly scale our network's capacity to keep up with increasing bandwidth demands means that customers will continue to have a positive experience using our cloud, hosted IT and high-speed broadband services, as well as video services like CenturyLink Prism TV."

Spectral efficiency gains in the trial were achieved by using Ciena's WaveLogic 3 based 16QAM coherent modulation, WaveLogic 3 spectral shaping, and Flexible Grid technologies.

"Ciena and CenturyLink have a long-standing relationship and this trial demonstrates the future-proof nature of Ciena's high-capacity terabit optical technology, which is designed to help network operators adjust the latency and capacity of their networks so that they can thrive in today's app-centric world," said Francois Locoh-Donou, senior vice president, global products group, Ciena.

About CenturyLink
CenturyLink is the third largest telecommunications company in the United States and is recognized as a leader in the network services market by technology industry analyst firms. The company is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprise customers. CenturyLink provides data, voice and managed services in local, national and select international markets through its high-quality advanced fiber optic network and multiple data centers for businesses and consumers. The company also offers advanced entertainment services under the CenturyLink^® Prism^TM TV and DIRECTV brands. Headquartered in Monroe, La., CenturyLink is an S&P 500 company and is included among the Fortune 500 list of America's largest corporations. For more information, visit www.centurylink.com.

About Ciena
Ciena (NYSE: CIEN) is the network specialist. We collaborate with customers worldwide to unlock the strategic potential of their networks and fundamentally change the way they perform and compete. Ciena leverages its deep expertise in packet and optical networking and distributed software automation to deliver solutions in alignment with its OPⁿ architecture for next-generation networks. We enable a high-scale, programmable infrastructure that can be controlled and adapted by network-level applications, and provide open interfaces to coordinate computing, storage and network resources in a unified, virtualized environment. For updates on Ciena news, follow us on Twitter @Ciena or on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/company/ciena. Investors are encouraged to review the Investors section of our website at www.ciena.com/investors, where we routinely post press releases, SEC filings, recent news, financial results, and other announcements. From time to time we exclusively post material information to this website along with other disclosure channels that we use.

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SOURCE CenturyLink, Inc.

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