The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) is a nonprofit corporation formed in 1996 to provide high-performance, high-bandwidth networking services to California universities and research institutions. Through this corporation, representatives from all of California's K-20 public education combine their networking resources toward the operation, deployment, and maintenance of the California Research and Education Network, or CalREN.
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Charter institutions which are connected to the CalREN backbone include:
Other non-Charter participants include
CalREN is a three-tiered network consisting of a statewide optical backbone to which schools and other institutions in California connect at Gigabit speeds via leased circuits obtained from telecom carriers or fiber-optic cable. These tiers include:
All three network tiers operate independently.
CENIC also engages in networking peering relationships, in particular Pacific Wave (a joint project between CENIC and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, the University of Southern California, and the University of Washington), which provides peering facilities along the Pacific coast of the United States. Pacific Wave participants include networks in Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Qatar, Taiwan, Singapore, and the United States.
CENIC also engages in peering via TransitRail, a national-level peering structure that allows NLR members to leverage their membership in that organization to engage in peering relationships to cut costs and improve networking performance.
CalREN also connects at Gigabit speeds to Internet2, National LambdaRail, CUDI (the Corporación Universitaria para el Desarrollo de Internet), the Mexican high-bandwidth research and education network, redCLARA (the Cooperación Latino-Americana de Redes Avanzadas), and CAnet4 (the Canadian optical research and education network, managed by CANARIE).
CENIC is also a member of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility, an international organization promoting the use of worldwide optical networking to support grid computing.
CalREN was expanded by funding through the state of California and its Digital California Project to include K-12 public education. When funding sources changed, the K-12 portion became the K-12 High Speed Network (K12HSN), which continues to contract through CENIC.