Apr 11, 2023

Answering Your Questions about Middle-Mile Networks: a series from CENIC

After the passage of CA Senate Bill 156 in July 2021, CENIC created the CENIC California Middle-Mile Broadband Initiative, LLC dba GOLDENSTATENET in order to aid the CA Department of Technology and other state agencies in the design and construction of a middle-mile broadband infrastructure that would close the state’s stubborn digital divide once and for all.

As a result of this, CENIC received numerous inquiries from our members and our partners about the funds associated with this initiative, its benefits for our CENIC community, and how the middle mile will interact with existing networks, including CalREN. Many of these questions focus on California’s middle-mile network and our role in it.

However, many other questions focus on middle-mile networks themselves – what they are, what they will do for last-mile networks and their customers, the service products they could deliver, how they connect into the existing Internet, and how public and private networks will work together in one of the nation's most geographically and socially diverse states.

To address these questions for audiences in California and beyond, 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.

Download each PDF individually, or download the whole set for an excellent primer on topics like the following:

• Middle Mile Networks: What and Why: how middle-mile networks bridge the gap between the global Internet and regional last-mile providers, so they can connect their customers to the world and the services they need.

• Build or Buy? Diverse Solutions: the many factors influencing decisions surrounding the installation of new fiber to serve rural and remote communities and purchase of long-term leases on existing fiber for urban ones.

• Service Product Offerings on a Middle-Mile Network: the layered structure of a middle-mile network and services a last-mile provider can find at each network layer.

• Optical Services over Middle-Mile Networks: how Wave and Spectrum Optical Services can enable carriers and last-mile providers to turn up complex, high-capacity service products quickly and cost-effectively.

• Resilient Communities Need Resilient Networks: how middle-mile networks, used for nearly all of today's critical activities, are designed for resilience and the guiding principles behind the design and implementation decisions.

• Transit, Peering, and Exchange Points: how networks connect to one another, the factors behind their decisions, how connections are facilitated, and the impacts on rural service.

• Middle-Mile Network Access for California’s Tribes: how a middle-mile network could provide access to regional ISPs and Tribes at capacity that will allow networks to scale to accommodate the needs of an entire community.

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