The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and Level 3 Communications announced this week the first 100-gigabits-per-second (Gbps) research and education connections to Level 3’s global network have been completed in Los Angeles and San Jose.
CENIC manages and operates the 3,800-mile fiber-based California Research & Education Network (CalREN), which has almost 10,000 connection sites among K-12 schools, public libraries, community colleges, the California State University, University of California campuses and private universities such as Caltech and Stanford.
“This upgrade of CENIC’s ability to deliver cost-effective bandwidth to our members keeps CENIC ahead of the increasing bandwidth demands," said Dave Reese, vice president of infrastructure planning at CENIC. “Level 3’s network continues to deliver the performance and capacity necessary to support California’s technology-enabled education and research activities, and the timing of this enhancement couldn’t be better as we are connecting more than 1,100 public libraries across California to CalREN."
Last fall, CENIC upgraded CalREN to a 100-Gbps backbone in order to keep pace with growing demand.
CalREN carries almost 30 petabytes of traffic each month, and traffic is growing 30 percent annually, a Stanford official said this week.
