Ciena’s Wavesmith gear wins Verizon contract

Verizon has chosen Ciena’s DN 7 multiservice ATM platform for a nationwide rollout with plans to cap and grow its existing ATM switches for fast-packet applications, Ciena said today.

"We’re the second vendor in that network, and we’ll be the vendor moving forward in that network," Ciena’s senior product marketing manager Chuck Sullivan said. Verizon has historically used Lucent’s CBX-500 ATM switches to replace frame relay switches.

Though Ciena won’t quantify the deal in terms of revenue or units, the news is significant for the optical equipment vendor because it involves the product line that Ciena obtained by acquiring Wavesmith Networks last spring.

The contract Wavesmith had at the time with another regional Bell operating company, SBC, was said to be a large part of the impetus for Ciena to acquire the vendor. Wavesmith had about three or four customers at the time Ciena acquired it, Sullivan said. Today Ciena has "on the order of ten or so" customers for the DN 7, including Birch Telecom, a Midwestern CLEC, which Ciena announced in August 2003.