CENIC’s NOC monitors the CalREN backbone and all connections into CalREN around the clock. Members can contact the NOC anytime, and CENIC’s team of experienced, highly trained network engineers will respond quickly and work with our members to resolve any issues.

By having CENIC membership and connecting to CalREN, members can directly interact not only with other CENIC members but also with other educational institutions around the globe, whether on policy matters, “how to’s,” timely information about network security issues and practices, data-intensive projects, and various other topics or issues related to how this type of dedicated high-performance infrastructure can best support the unique and evolving needs of R&E institutions.

CalREN’s settlement-free peering services (with nearly 100 peers) provide high-speed access to many data-intensive sites frequented by researchers, students, and educators, such as AWS and other public clouds, as well as to other research and education networks around the world. This keeps a majority of CENIC-member traffic off the commercial internet, where most congestion and service quality issues occur.

CENIC does not charge any members on a per-bit basis. In addition, CENIC Charter Associates also have access to the entire portfolio of networks that CENIC either manages or has peering relationships with, including access to Internet2, other R&E networks, the commodity Internet, other CENIC member institutions (through CalREN), and Layer 1 (wave), Layer 2 (VLAN), and Layer 3 (IP-VPN) services.

CENIC represents the networking needs of California’s entire K-20 research and education community, enabling bulk purchasing power through our economies of scale that results in deeply discounted pricing for network hardware and software that would never be available to an individual institution purchasing these on its own.