May 20, 2025

CENIC, Juniper Networks Enable 800 Gbps Connections to California Research and Education Network for CENIC Members

San Diego State University (SDSU) recently announced that it would become the first CENIC member—and the first research institution in the world—to enjoy a native 800 Gigabit per second (Gbps) connection to a high-performance research and education network, the network being of course CENIC’s California Research and Education Network (CalREN). That connection is now active, and CENIC anticipates further interest from other member institutions.

This project was made possible through collaboration between CENIC, SDSU, and the California State University system, as well as with Juniper Networks, which has been steadfast in its support for California’s research and education community through its relationship with CENIC.

“With the leadership of San Diego State University guided by James Frazee (Vice President of Information Technology and CIO), and the California State University Chancellor’s Office organized by Kendra Ard (Chief Infrastructure Officer), and with strong support from our partner Juniper Networks, another R&E networking milestone has been achieved: a native 800 Gbps connection to the CENIC network,” stated Louis Fox, CENIC’s Chief Executive Officer.

“With the data-hungry bandwidth demands of AI, cloud computing, global-scale scientific instruments, and large data-sharing collaborations, SDSU is well-prepared to meet these challenges,” Fox added. “Virtualization and containerization for incredibly rapid transmission of data between virtual machines, containers, and cloud computing users will support complex visualizations and analysis of massive data sources.

“Moreover, 800 Gbps will have positive environmental impacts and cost savings because of reduced power and space demands in data centers and co-location facilities. This is an important moment when, as Greg Bell, former Executive Director of ESnet, insightfully noted, ‘Advanced networks again demonstrate their important roles as scientific instruments.’”

In fact, CENIC recently announced the deployment of Juniper’s PTX10002 packet transport routers that have enabled a native 800 Gbps speeds on geographically suitable, heavily used backbone paths, and that was only possible thanks to an extraordinary level of collaboration between CENIC and Juniper at the highest levels.

“Building a robust, sustainable and scalable backbone network in the AI era is fundamentally important for the research and education community, and Juniper is pleased to bring our proven “networks for AI” know-how to CENIC’s groundbreaking deployment at SDSU,” said Rami Rahim, Chief Executive Officer, Juniper Networks. “It’s no secret that GenAI workloads take network performance and capacity into a new paradigm, making a fast, reliable WAN an imperative for success.”

Now, thanks to Juniper enabling CENIC and SDSU to trial its new 800ZR coherent pluggable optics, that institution is the first in the world to enjoy a fully 800 Gbps path from its campus across its backbone and on to other collaborating institutions. As other research and education institutions begin to connect at this speed, CENIC member institutions will become the premier collaboration partners of choice in global big-data disciplines.

“This milestone reflects SDSU’s commitment to advancing research and education through next-generation infrastructure—our new 800 Gbps connection positions us to lead in data-intensive fields like AI, climate science, and real-time global collaboration,” said James Frazee, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO at San Diego State University.

CENIC is absolutely delighted to make this leap forward possible for its members through its positive, high-level relationships with major networking innovators like Juniper. We will be sure to keep you up-to-date as more CENIC member institutions begin to join the global community of near-Terabit-enabled collaboration.

If you’d like to learn more about achieving ultra-high-speed connectivity to the CalREN backbone, please contact your institution’s representative at the CENIC Project Management Office.

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