Network Overview

CENIC's California Research and Education Network (CalREN) is a multi-tiered, advanced network-services fabric serving the majority of research and education institutions in the state. The CalREN backbone includes roughly 8,000 miles of CENIC-owned and managed fiber, last-mile fiber, and hundreds of optical components.

CENIC engineers perform regular upgrades at the three network layers outlined below. Recent network upgrades include:

Layer 1: Optical Backbone

• Upgraded the coastal path between LA and Sunnyvale to flexible grid technology in support of planned 400G+ backbone upgrades
• Added colorless, directionless, contentionless (CDC) capabilities to the coastal path to extend software provisioning to the optical layer
• Completed new fiber path in northern California between Corning and Sacramento. New fiber path adds diversity for Corning and includes two new optical nodes in Chico and Palo Cedro
• Extend flexible grid and CDC capabilities to the Inland route traversing Oakland, Sacramento, Fergus, Fresno, Bakersfield, and Riverside (FY 23)
• Initial deployment of SmartOptics metro optical solution to provide additional peering capacity up to 500 Gbps and distances up to 40 km

Layer 2: (DC/HPR customer access, commodity peering transport, and Pacific Wave exchange)

• Upgraded the Pacific Wave backbone between Los Angeles and Sunnyvale to 1x300G, leveraging CENIC’c flexible grid capabilities over the coastal path (FY23)
• Upgrade of the Pacific Wave backbone capacity between Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, and Seattle to 400G (FY23)
• Upgrade the WRN backbone between Los Angeles, El Paso, Albuquerque, Denver, Chicago, and Seattle to 100G+
• Availability of MPLS based L2 solution, ELAN, and ELINE, to provide a more robust and seamless L2 connection
• Migration of current L2 circuits to MPLS based L2 solutions

Layer 3: Routed Networks (DC and HPR backbones)

• Deployed Segment Routing MPLS across the backbone to support flexible MPLS services
• Consolidation of DC and HPR platforms to provide additional flexibility in associate connectivity and location
• Consolidation of DC and HPR backbone links to 4x100G to enable more efficient use of available backbone bandwidth (FY22)
• Upgrade of backbone aggregation routers at major hub sites to support 400Gbps connection (FY22)
• Upgrade of 400G capable backbone aggregation router at Triangle Court and San Diego (FY22)
• Upgrade of higher density 100G capable DC backbone aggregation router at Fresno, Fergus, Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Luis Obispo (FY22)
• Implementation and deployment of enhanced network architectures and features (Route Reflector, Next-Hop Self, BGP PIC, TI-LFA) for quicker restoration of services (FY22)