Ciena Corporation announced that the Romanian Educational Network (RoEduNet) has chosen Ciena's high-capacity coherent optical technology for the first live 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) network in Eastern Europe. The next-generation infrastructure, deployed together with Ciena's BizConnect partner Felix Telecom, provides scientists and researchers from Romania the highest network capacity available on the commercial market for science and education projects.

RoEduNet, the Romanian National Research and Education Network (NREN), connects universities, schools, research centers and cultural institutions across the country, providing high speed data transport and Internet access services to them at no cost. Operating more than 4200 km of optical fiber to connect cities and academic campuses, RoEduNet forms part of GEANT -- the European education and research network linking academic and research institutions in more than 30 European countries.

The newly deployed 100 GbE link connects Bucharest, the capital of Romania, with Iasi, the country's second largest city located more than 450 kilometers to the north. The deployment forms part of an expansion of RoEduNet's existing nationwide optical infrastructure, which is based on Ciena's 6500 Packet-Optical Platform and Common Photonic Layer, by simply adding 100G wavelengths alongside 10G wavelengths. Felix Telecom is responsible for the design, installation, deployment and ongoing service for both RoEduNet's existing 10G network as well as the new 100G infrastructure.

"Ciena's scalable network architecture is making it possible -- and easy -- for us to perform a smooth and cost-effective transition from our 10G network to 100G," said Germin Mihai Dinu, general director of ARNIEC, the agency managing RoEduNet. "We can increase network bandwidth simply and economically, which allows us to accelerate our work tenfold on complex research projects that require resources from all over the world. The ease of scalability and increased networking speed offered by Ciena's optical networking technology enhances Romania's ability to collaborate on cutting-edge science and research projects and enables our scientists to work with their peers at high performance computing and research centers across the globe. For these reasons we plan to continue installing 100 Gbps links to connect the main nodes in our network."

"Our collaboration with RoEduNet highlights Ciena's unique capability to address the growing networking needs of the research and education sector by building scalable, dynamic and reconfigurable networks," said Rod Wilson, senior director of external research at Ciena. "Groundbreaking research projects like the Large Hadron Collider or the Very Large Telescope array mean that scientists need high-capacity networks to quickly and effectively share research data for processing. Ciena's approach to intelligent infrastructures using advanced silicon, software and switching technologies provides ideal solutions for operators most critical needs -- like coherent optics for capacity requirements like those of RoEduNet."

Ciena's market-leading coherent technology for optical transmission benefits from several years of deployment experience, including in excess of 7,000 coherent 40G/100G line interfaces shipped to more than 80 customers across the globe with more than 6.5 million coherent kilometers deployed. Equipped with WaveLogic coherent optical processors, the high-capacity solutions offer a unique approach to coherent networking that improves network economics and offers unmatched architecture flexibility. Global research and education organizations using Ciena equipment include RENATER (France), CANARIE (Canada), Internet2 (US), and JANET (UK).