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CENIC’s Integrated, Multi-Tool Approach to Network Configuration Management
At the CENIC Biennial Conference, network engineers discussed Network Configuration Management (NCM) at CENIC – how and why it was implemented, the components that comprise it, how it’s used, and its potential for the future.
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Next-Gen Stewardship of Urban Sea Systems: Balancing Economic Vitality, Environmental Decline, Homeland Security, and Social Justice
Oceanographer John Delaney discusses how digital twins can help model the behavior of major urban sea systems and improve their economic vitality, environmental health, homeland security, and social justice.
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Three Quick Guidelines to Help Your Organization Stay Safe from RPKI-Related Hacking
Using secure passwords, enabling MFA, and defining those authorized to make changes to your ARIN account can help your institution avoid RPKI-related hacking.
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From the Ground to the Stars: Critical Big-Data Research in Africa
Learn about critical data-dependent research collaborations currently taking place in the nations of Africa, all of which require integration into the global high-performance network and cyberinfrastructure environments.
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Connecting Last-Mile Customers at 100 Gbps Leveraging High-Launch-Power Coherent Pluggable Optics
Learn how middle- and last-mile providers can connect last-mile customers at 1-to-100 Gbps by leveraging High Launch Power Coherent Pluggable optics (OpenZR+).
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Doing More with Less: Balancing Network Energy Budgets through Spectrum Services
Learn about Spectrum Services, the latest innovation in service provisioning offered by CENIC over CalREN and how it makes network services more equipment- and energy-efficient.
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Broadband-enabled Energy Innovations for Anchor Institutions: the latest from CENIC's California Broadband, Energy, and the Environment Series
Find out how CENIC was able to reduce its power use by over two thirds – a major cost savings and reduction in power consumption while still increasing capacity for its member communities.
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Product Testing and Validation Testbeds as a Service over Middle-Mile Infrastructure
To vendors, service providers, or research teams, extensive middle-mile fiber infrastructure can play the role of an elastic testbed that matches real-world production networks.
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CENIC’s Role in the “Broadband for All” Initiative
When Governor Newsom, California's legislature, and administration leaders launched the "Broadband for All" Initiative, they sought the experienced expertise of CENIC and its engineering talent to serve as third-party administrator. The CENIC Middle Mile Broadband Initiative, LLC, DBA GoldenStateNet, was launched to serve the goal of collapsing the digital divide for all Californians.
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The California Middle Mile Broadband Initiative and CENIC: Creating a Bespoke Organization to Serve California
As a non-profit public benefit technology corporation, CENIC has been at the forefront of work to advance and expand access to its advanced network and help close the digital divide.
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CA Broadband, Energy, and the Environment Series: the first installment in a new series
Find out how CENIC was able to reduce its power use by over two thirds – a major cost savings and reduction in power consumption while still increasing capacity for its member communities.
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Wireless on the Edge: Connecting Hard-to-Serve Areas
Hard-to-reach areas may require wireless edge networks to connect to a middle-mile backbone. Tradeoffs in frequency, license status, and power can make it challenging to determine the best solution.
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California’s Landmark “Internet for All Initiative” featuring CENIC’s Key Role Launches Marconi Society Webinar Series
Through its webinar series “A National Inflection Point: The Intersection of Research & Education Networks and Sustainable Digital Equity Initiatives”, the Marconi Society will feature state initiatives underway to share creative approaches to solving predictable challenges with extending R&E infrastructure beyond its legacy community of educational institutions.
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Responding to disasters: the CENIC community’s role in response and recovery
Fires, floods, earthquakes, and now pandemics have become part of the landscape for Californians in this second decade of the 21st Century.
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Answering Your Questions about Middle-Mile Networks: a series from CENIC
CENIC has developed a series of concise, easy-to-read PDFs that can get any interested party up to speed on the hottest topic in networking today: Middle-Mile Networks.
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Get Your Cybersecurity Program Up and Running with the Trusted CI Framework
Learn about the Trusted CI Framework, developed by the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence and created to help your scientific research facility overcome the obstacles to standing up a cybersecurity program for its cyberinfrastructure.
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CENIC in 2022: A Groundbreaking Year for CENIC and California
Learn more about CENIC’s achievements in 2022 including GOLDENSTATENET, Tribal engagement, broadband advocacy, increased performance, efficiency, and resilience for CalREN, our 25th anniversary celebration, and the return of our in-person annual conference.
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Engaging the Minds We Need
Innovation frequently happens in the liminal spaces between disciplines, where different perspectives collaborate and create new insights into seemingly intractable problems, some of the most pressing of which are global climate change, economic development, and public health. But what happens when millions of vitally needed imaginations and perspectives – these minds – have no access to the cyberinfrastructure that makes global collaboration possible?
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Solving Network Connections for USC on Catalina Island
CalREN connection and resiliency for USC's Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and its Marine Science Center on Catalina Island
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Minding Our MANRS: CENIC and Global Internet Routing Security
Learn about CENIC’s participation in the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative, which ensures a more secure Internet that is less likely to experience network routing issues and distributed denial of service attacks.
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Rich Fagen and Networks: from Big Science to High Culture
Rich Fagen, until very recently the Chief Digital Officer at the J. Paul Getty Trust or the Getty, was among the creative founders who helped form CENIC in the 1990s. Now on the occasion of his retirement, his career can be regarded as the perfect reflection of the way high-performance networking – initially created to support data-driven big science – has become just as vital for data-driven arts and culture.
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Tribal Broadband Connectivity: Obstacles, Opportunities, Optimism
At CENIC’s 2022 Annual Conference, Tribal telecommunications experts Matthew “Speygee” Douglas, Linnea Jackson, and Matt Rantanen shed light on a few of the stubborn obstacles to Tribal broadband deployments – what they are and how they complicate Tribal broadband deployments in California – and how progress has been made in the face of them. They also reminded attendees that these challenges may take on different aspects for the 574 federally recognized Tribes throughout the US.
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Old Problems Need New Solutions: Digital Equity in California
To solve problems that have never been solved, we must do things that have never been done. In a nutshell, this was the message shared by California leaders in economic development, higher education, policy, and infrastructure during the “Digital Equity in California” panel at CENIC’s 2022 Conference that took place this September in Monterey, CA.
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CENIC Welcomes Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center
CENIC is pleased to welcome Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center to its community of leading-edge R&E network users. “We’re looking forward to seeing what we can do with this network,” said Dr. Neal Hurlburt, Senior Manager of Space Sciences and Instrumentation. “We know this connection will allow us to collaborate more closely with our customers and partners.”
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Next Generation Infrastructure, Boosted by MPLS, Delivers Results
As CENIC continues the march forward in its upgrade of the CalREN backbone, an important feature of this work has been the migration of member and Associates’ services to Multi-Protocol Label Switching or MPLS with segment routing. Already, CENIC’s engineering teams are closing in on migrating 50 percent of members to MPLS, an exciting achievement that enables a range of new features.
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The Future of Network Automation at CENIC
The Future of Network Automation at CENIC: the CENIC Network Operations Center implemented a hotly anticipated enhancement to its customer service functions: targeted network announcements. With this new enhancement, authorized contacts at connected sites throughout California will receive tailored email announcements should a planned or unplanned outage specifically impact their service. More information about the new targeted network announcements can be found at cenic.org.
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The Broadband Infrastructure Grant (BIG) Identifies and Connects Schools to CalREN
The Broadband Infrastructure Grant (BIG) Identifies and Connects Schools to CalREN
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The San Diego Promise Zone: Connecting Potential with Promise
The San Diego Promise Zone: Connecting Potential with Promise When parts of San Diego became one of the twenty-two federally designated Promise Zones in the U.S., the community came together in creative ways to improve the quality of life for all Zone residents. The focus of the initiative is to increase access to everything from affordable housing to jobs, safe environments, educational opportunities, healthcare, and economic activity.
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CENIC Support for NOAA
We have come to expect much from those who predict and forecast weather as our ever-changing climate impacts our lives. And those whose job it is to provide us with that information rely on NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, within the US Department of Commerce. Today NOAA’s predictive strength is linked to N-Wave, it's network service provider that ensures high quality, highly scalable connections and network solutions to its federal agency via science, research, and education partners across the country.
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CENIC Promotes Key Employees
Despite the impact of a global pandemic and the unique climate challenges in our state, this team has risen to a range of opportunities to further our mission by pursuing an upgraded network via the Next Generation Infrastructure initiative; assumed a range of responsibilities involving our support for the GoldenStateNet initiative; and, ensured Californian’s remained connected to each other and the world despite the challenges.
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Transformed Infrastructure for Sustained Network Connections at SC22
Each year, networking engineers from CENIC and its partners spend weeks devising critical infrastructure to enable a range of demonstration projects, dedicating nearly eighty percent of the effort to building the network infrastructure for the demonstrations, with the demonstrations themselves receiving twenty percent of the focus. That distribution of effort was forever shifted with a few innovative decisions resulting from the SC21 conference that retained the network infrastructure developed in support of dynamic, multi-domain path provisioning developed for the event. And those decisions are already having an impact on planning for SC22.
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Val Verde School District Broadband Network Provides Case Study for Closing the Digital Divide
A public-private partnership to provide internet connectivity for residents in the Val Verde Unified School District (USD) serves as a model case study for broadband deployment to hard-to-reach populations.
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PRP: Fulfilling the Promise of Collapsing Space and Time
The Pacific Research Platform (PRP) was originally conceived in 2014 by member institutions of CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, as a way to support data-intensive research projects. The challenge was to connect multiple researchers located in multiple locations who require rapid access to dispersed datasets. It has become a significant force in developing an entirely new model of cyber-infrastructure ecology.
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SC21 + CENIC
As the SC21 conference launches both in St. Louis and virtually, CENIC’s network engineering team is hard at work preparing to help support a number of demonstration projects designed to show the power of global collaboration to fuel science and discovery.
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CENIC Perspectives: Hybrid Approach to Last-Mile Connectivity Should Include Wireless
As we are entering a moment where decisions are being made about state and federal broadband resources, policymakers should focus on standards for what constitutes broadband rather than the specific technology chosen for last-mile infrastructure.
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Progress Towards “Future-Proofing” CENIC’s Network
In support of CENIC’s new spectrum service offering, engineers worked creatively to overcome obstacles posed by the ongoing pandemic including remote collaboration and supply chain slowdowns. The team successfully augmented the spectrum termination capabilities in Los Angeles and in Sunnyvale by 16 flexible grid capable ports, each with the capacity to terminate services between 100G and 800G. This new infrastructure is capable of supporting colorless, directionless, and contentionless (CDC) technologies, which are prerequisites for enabling software provisioning in the optical layer.
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The Minds We Need: Federal Broadband Investment Should Include Research and Education Infrastructure
As the federal government considers a major investment in broadband, members of the research and education community, including CENIC, Internet2, The Quilt, and EDUCAUSE, came together this spring to support and publish The Minds We Need.
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Life Inside CENIC: Sana Bellamine and Core Engineering
Sana Bellamine works in Core Engineering, which is instrumental in connecting millions of Californians with reliable and forward-thinking solutions, from basic broadband to advanced services with experimental networks.
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Virtual Excavations: Pacific Research Platform Enables Remote Collaboration on Underwater Archeological Dig in Israel
Supported by CENIC's 400-gigabit research network, the Pacific Research Platform has not only enabled researchers at UC San Diego and their partners at the University of Haifa in Israel to go ahead with their archeological dig despite the COVID-19 pandemic but also drastically accelerated data analysis times.
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CENIC 2020 & 2021: Wrapping Up and Looking Ahead
We look back at CENIC's achievements in 2020 and look ahead to the goals we continue to pursue in 2021.
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CENIC PERSPECTIVES: Fixed Wireless Solutions to Extend Internet Connectivity
Many CENIC member community anchor institutions are looking for ways to extend online connectivity to unserved and underserved communities, particularly now that broadband has become essential during the COVID 19 pandemic. In areas where wireline broadband may be geographically or economically prohibitive, fixed wireless Internet may be an option. In tandem with a previous CENIC blog article on wireless technologies as a whole, this article specifically explores fixed wireless solutions that our members are using or could use to address equity and access issues.
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Life Inside CENIC: Lee Ann Weber and the Communications Department
The communications team’s work is driven by CENIC’s mission to advance education and research statewide by providing the world-class network essential for innovation, collaboration, and economic growth. We share our knowledge and serve as an advocate for public policy that advances broadband access for all.
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CENIC Offering Mitigation Solutions for Volumetric Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
CENIC is now offering its members protection from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which have the potential to prevent people from accessing online resources, and in the worst cases, to take institutions offline completely.
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CENIC PERSPECTIVES: Wireless Internet Technologies for Access, Equity, and Continuity
Wireless technologies have the potential to address many common challenges facing the CENIC community. While CENIC is not providing wireless connections, we have been working with our members, offering our expertise in solving access and equity problems, and providing referrals to our private sector partners.
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Libraries Are Key to Providing Broadband Access to California Communities
We live in an increasingly interconnected world, and to fully participate in it—whether that means searching for information online, distance learning, or interviewing for a job on Zoom—requires ever-increasing bandwidth. Unfortunately, approximately one in eight households in California lacks high-speed Internet access, with the digital divide having a disproportionate impact on people of color and low-income and rural households.
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