CENIC Completes 800 Gbps Upgrade to California Research and Education Network

In March 2025, CENIC announced that it had achieved a major milestone when it completed an upgrade of the Southern Route of its California Research and Education Network (CalREN) to 800 Gbps capacity using coherent pluggable optics. As promised, the remaining Inland and Coastal Routes, which were marked as “In Progress” in the previous article, have been upgraded, thereby resulting in a full 800 Gbps backbone.

Massive Upgrade with Massive Savings in Space, Cost, and Power

This series of major upgrades was achieved thanks to the efforts of CENIC’s engineering team. As the diagram below shows, the majority of the CalREN backbone, with the exception of three long segments, now operates with no transponders, with all segments using two pairs of pluggables for a total capacity of 2x400 Gbps. This design allows for significant colocation space and power savings, a greatly simplified network design, and lower backbone router port utilization.

An additional enhancement will be to transition the Los Angeles–Riverside segment of the Southern Route to coherent pluggables by the end of December 2025. (The two other segments will retain transponders due to their large distances that make pluggables unsuitable.)

Greatly Enhancing What the CENIC Membership Can Do for California

Of course, the heart of the matter, as always, is CENIC’s responsibility to its members.

Recent stories on the CENIC blog are a showcase of what CalREN and membership in CENIC make possible for the state’s research and education institutions. For example, the San Joaquin Valley Library System can now offer reliable Wi-Fi service to patrons at all 105 of its locations thanks to the high-performance networking and cost savings provided by CENIC. Schools and libraries can serve as emergency response centers during natural disasters, offering shelter, information, and access to desperately needed services and resources. Scientists and researchers at CENIC member institutions help the state understand, predict, and prepare for disasters, and the majority of first responders in California receive training at one of the state’s community colleges.

Of course, one of the most powerful CENIC initiatives is the ever-growing CENIC AI Resource (CENIC AIR), to which an expanding list of CENIC member institutions is connecting and contributing. By connecting to CENIC AIR via a Science DMZ, all CENIC members can take advantage of a massive, shared compute and storage resource and even “burst” beyond California to the resources of the National Research Platform and the over 5,000 large datasets from 49 organizations made available over the National Data Platform.

All of these activities on behalf of and resources for research and education are made even more effective thanks to the upgraded CalREN backbone, which results in a capacity of 25 Tbps per span using Spectrum Services. Members have also begun to connect to CalREN at similar speeds, including Caltech’s 400 Gbps connection and San Diego State University (SDSU)’s native 800 Gbps connection to CalREN, the latter being the first research institution in the world to enjoy a native 800 Gbps connection to any high-performance research and education network.

A Terabit-Plus Backbone in the Near Future

The next stage of equipment upgrades for CalREN will involve the deployment of Juniper’s state-of-the-art PTX10002 packet transport router throughout the backbone in pursuit of a 2x800 Gbps backbone for all tiers of CalREN. Also, the backbone optical system will be upgraded to Cisco’s NCS1010 line system. Taken together, these upgrades will result in further significant savings in space, power, and maintenance costs.

And, of course, CENIC continues to pursue network management and automation solutions that will make it even more efficient for us to deploy new services. This way, our member institutions can benefit from the 800 Gbps CalREN backbone even more quickly and easily.

We’ll be sure to keep you up to date on the latest news relating to CalREN and how students, faculty, and staff at your institutions can make use of its ever-growing capacity. If you’d like to learn more about how California’s research and education community is making use of the high-performance networking and opportunities for collaboration that come with CENIC membership, watch out for announcements about our next biennial conference, The Right Connection, which will take place from March 30–April 1, 2026 in Monterey, California.