The California Research and Education Network (CalREN) has built a new and diverse fiber path between Sacramento and Northern California, adding to its inland route. The new path creates a diverse 260-mile regional loop from Sacramento and back, traveling through Colusa, Corning, Palo Cedro, and Chico. The path has 3.2 terabits of spectrum capacity and includes new nodes in Chico and Palo Cedro.
California Research and Education Network upgrades to 400G
The California Research and Education Network (CalREN) is now able to provide high-capacity services, from 100G to 400G and beyond, on its coastal path between Los Angeles and Sunnyvale. The 460-mile upgraded optical route includes nodes in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Soledad.
The upgrades leverages flex-grid spectrum Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs). Flex grid optimizes the amount of spectrum used per wavelength, enabling more data capacity to be provisioned over fiber spans.
CalREN, which is operated by CENIC, serves the vast majority of K-20 students, educators, researchers, and individuals at other vital public-serving institutions. CalREN operates over 8,000 miles of fiber optic cable and serves more than 20 million users.
In 2019, CENIC upgraded the southern path of its network between Los Angeles and Riverside, including nodes in Tustin, Oceanside, San Diego, Escondido, and Sun City. Work will start in the fall on upgrades to the final inland path, which completes the network ring from Sunnyvale back to Los Angeles and includes nodes in Oakland, Sacramento, Fergus, Fresno, and Bakersfield.
“Next-generation infrastructure ensures CENIC can easily meet today’s networking demands while remaining flexible to meet the needs of tomorrow,” said CENIC President and CEO Louis Fox. “These upgrades provide CENIC’s members a more robust and efficient network on which to conduct data-intensive research, support teaching and learning, provide cutting-edge medical care, and enhance community engagement.”
CENIC is also supporting the Pacific Research Platform (PRP), a partnership of more than 50 institutions, led by researchers at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, with support from the National Science Foundation. PRP builds on the optical backbone of Pacific Wave, a project of CENIC and Pacific Northwest Gigapop, to create a high-speed freeway for large scientific data sets by connecting campus networks and supercomputing centers on a regional scale, with Science DMZs at each site.
