Shentel Selects Ciena to Expand 4G Mobile Backhaul Network

Ciena^® Corporation (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings), the network specialist, today announced that Shenandoah Telecommunications Company (“Shentel”) (NASDAQ: SHEN), a leading regional U.S. telecommunications service provider, has deployed Ciena’s packet networking, unified management and Service Level Agreements (SLA) portal solutions to support its expanding Fiber-to-the-Tower (FTTT) and mobile backhaul services. Working with Ciena, Shentel has built a highly reliable and automated backhaul infrastructure to support its mobile operator customers’ transition to 4G wireless infrastructure across Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland.

Key Facts:

• Shentel provides a broad range of diversified communications services to end-user customers and other communications providers via its high speed, state-of-the-art network.  Shentel is a Sprint PCS affiliate and offers 4G LTE service to portions of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. Shentel offers its business customers dedicated Ethernet Internet, Ethernet private line, Ethernet virtual private line, and tower collocation leasing.
• Shentel is leveraging Ciena’s 3930, 3931 and 3960 Service Delivery Switches – interconnected with G.8032 Ethernet rings to provide greater network scalability, resiliency and protection. Ciena’s OneControl Unified Management System provides Shentel with simplified low-touch service activation, which enables rapid service delivery, comprehensive service visualization and network diagnostics. This also gives Shentel and its customers the ability to monitor real-time network traffic and identify potential issues before they impact service delivery.

• Additionally, Shentel is deploying Ciena’s cloud-based SLA Portal that provides direct access to SLA reports and gives Shentel and its customers visibility of the health and status of the service delivery.  The SLA Portal offers rapid and simple set-up because it is a fully managed SaaS-based service with no need for hardware, software or additional IT expenditures.

• Collectively, Ciena’s solutions will provide Shentel an OPⁿ network architecture that can easily scale to meet future bandwidth demands while providing the ability to dynamically manage traffic and service delivery. 

Executive Quotes:

• “By deploying Ciena’s packet networking and unified management solutions, we are able to efficiently meet the requirements of our growing customer base and provide the necessary bandwidth to support next generation mobile data services. Additionally, the cloud-based SLA portal gives us real-time visibility and service monitoring capabilities which means we are better able to manage our network.”
  -Ed McKay, Vice President of Wireline & Engineering at Shentel 

•  “As more businesses and end-users continue to increase their usage of mobile data and the industry continues to advance to 4G technology, new opportunities are opening for service providers like Shentel to expand their FTTT and other related offerings. With the power of our packet networking portfolio to quickly turn up services, service providers can augment that with resilient and cost effective backhaul services as their end-user demand dictates.”
  -Matt Salter, Vice President of U.S. Regional Service Providers at Ciena  

Technology Background:

• Ciena’s packet networking portfolio equips providers with greater speed – not just in terms of growing bandwidth, but also speed throughout the entire service life-cycle to address key challenges such as improving service turn-up and change intervals, accelerating problem resolution times and reducing overall customer churn. In fact in a few short years, Ciena’s mobile backhaul solution has already been deployed in close to 50 percent of North America’s Ethernet enabled cell towers.

• Used by more than 150 carriers, wireless service providers and cable operators worldwide, Ciena’s purpose-built packet networking solutions offer the industry’s richest set of OAM capabilities.  They support a wide range of key industry packet transport protocols, such as G.8032 and MPLS-TP thanks to the virtual switching capability native to Ciena’s packet portfolio.
• OPⁿ is Ciena’s approach for building open, programmable next-generation networks that scale and automatically adapt to handle the changes created by cloud/data center migration, mobile backhaul requirements and the growing demand for high-bandwidth applications and services.

Supporting Resources:

• White Paper: Built for Speed
• White Paper: OPⁿ Network Architecture
• Product Overview: Packet Networking Portfolio
• Product Overview: OneControl Unified Management System
• Product Overview: SLA Portal
• Application Note: Wireless Backhaul Network Solutions
• Chalk Talk: G.8032 – Ethernet Rings chalk talk

About Shenandoah Telecommunications
Shenandoah Telecommunications Company (Shentel) provides a broad range of diversified communications services through its high speed, state-of-the-art network to customers in the Mid-Atlantic United States. The Company’s services include: wireless voice and data; cable video, internet and voice; fiber network and services; and local and long distance telephone. Shentel is the exclusive personal communications service (“PCS”) Affiliate of Sprint in portions of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. For more information, please visit www.shentel.com. 

About Ciena
Ciena 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 OPⁿ, its approach for building open 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.

Note to Ciena Investors
Forward-looking statements. This press release contains certain forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on information available to the Company as of the date hereof; and Ciena’s actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied, due to risks and uncertainties associated with its business, which include the risk factors disclosed in its Report on Form 10-Q, which Ciena filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 11, 2013. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding Ciena’s expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward-looking words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “should,” “will,” and “would” or similar words. Ciena assumes no obligation to update the information included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Jamie Moody
Ciena Corporation
(214) 995-8035
pr@ciena.com

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