5 September 2003 Linthicum, MD Lightwave -- Infonet Services Corp., a provider of global communications services for multinationals, has selected equipment from CIENA Corp. for use in Infonet's wholly owned The World Network, accessible from more than 3,000 cities in 180 countries around the world. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Infonet has selected CIENA's CoreDirector intelligent core switch and MetroDirector K2 multiservice platform for deployment across multiple U.S. and European network sites. Infonet's deployment plans call for more than 30 CoreDirector systems across the network, in addition to MetroDirector K2 switches in more than 40 cities. Deployment is already underway.

"The economic benefits of CIENA's next-generation architecture support our objectives of increasing network efficiency and lowering overall costs while at the same time expanding our network reach into additional markets," said Paul Hibbert, chief technology officer at Infonet. "With intelligent mesh networking capabilities, the CIENA solution also provides a platform to migrate innovative service offerings to a dynamic next-generation architecture while leveraging our existing infrastructure."

According to CIENA, implementing an intelligent, mesh-based architecture will help Infonet migrate to a "self-aware" infrastructure with automated bandwidth provisioning and management across the network, while also providing "extensive" protection capabilities.