SPW&L Telecom Upgrades Municipal Fiber Optic Network with Ciena’s Carrier Ethernet Service Delivery Platforms

Network designed and managed by INOC delivers reliable Gigabit Ethernet connections for Sun Prairie School District, businesses, SPW&L smart water grid and other customers

Linthicum, MD — 03/10/2010

Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings), the network specialist, today announced that Sun Prairie Water & Light (SPW&L), a municipal utility company based in Sun Prairie, Wis., has deployed its Carrier Ethernet Service Delivery (CESD) platforms to upgrade the service delivery capabilities of the utility’s fiber optic network throughout its serving area. The network is run by the utility’s communication services division, SPW&L Telecom, and is already connecting all 12 locations of the Sun Prairie School District, multiple locations for WPPI Energy, Brooks Tractor, Laker Software and other business customers, as well as providing the communications infrastructure for the utility’s smart water grid.

SPW&L Telecom offers a variety of point-to-point and point-to-multipoint wide area network and Internet connections over the network that combine the reliability and performance of traditional carrier services with the cost-effectiveness of Ethernet. SPW&L Telecom’s network was designed and is managed on a 24×7 basis by its long-time partner, INOC, a global provider of outsourced network operations center (NOC) monitoring and reporting services. With a primary NOC in Madison, Wis., and a disaster recovery NOC near Chicago, Ill., INOC specializes in managing fiber optic networks to ensure their security, performance and availability to meet the strict service level agreements between service providers and their end customers.

“As a locally owned and operated utility, our focus is always on providing reliable, low-cost services to our customers that deliver true value in this competitive communications market,” said Gary Sanders, general manager of SPW&L Telecom. “By upgrading to advanced Carrier Ethernet technology, we have increased our network capacity, reliability and ability to manage the traffic of different customers across the network so we can deliver rigorous service level agreements at competitive prices combined with our unwavering focus on local customer service.”

In addition to its education and business customers, SPW&L’s water utility division has deployed Ciena’s CESD platforms at its water towers, well houses and reservoirs as the communications infrastructure for its new Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for intelligently monitoring and managing its water distribution facilities. By leveraging its own fiber network and fast, reliable Gigabit Ethernet connections, the utility was able to eliminate the cost and inefficiency of its old solution that required patching together leased lines from the local telephone company. SPW&L plans to implement a similar solution for its electricity facilities next year.

SPW&L Telecom consulted with INOC about upgrading the fiber network in order to add greater bandwidth capacity, reliability and traffic management to the network it originally deployed in 1999. Brian Parker, manager of network engineering at INOC, commented, “INOC’s goal is to ensure that our customers get a reliable, high performance fiber optic network that meets their immediate and long-term capacity goals. We selected Ciena’s CESD platforms because of the resiliency capabilities, PBB-TE support, and the OA&M feature set that will enable more robust monitoring to address any connectivity or performance management issues.”

Deployed by more than 100 customers worldwide, Ciena’s CESD portfolio is a family of service delivery and aggregation platforms that address a wide range of application, service, market and access technology requirements. The CESD products deployed in the SPW&L Telecom network include the CN 5305™ Service Aggregation Switch and CN 3920™, CN 3940™ and CN 3960™ Service Delivery Switches.

“This deployment underscores the power and simplicity of our Carrier Ethernet solutions. As part of a public power company, SPW&L Telecom has the rights-of-way to build a municipal network, but as a customer-owned, non-profit company it needs to do so as cost-effectively as possible,” said Mike Aquino, senior vice president, global field operations at Ciena. “In working closely with SPW&L Telecom, INOC knew Ciena was the best choice for creating a feature-rich Carrier Ethernet network with carrier-class reliability and intelligent software to automate and accelerate the process for provisioning, delivering and managing services to multiple customers.”

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