The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) today announced the connection of the rapidly-growing Coachella Valley area to its California Research & Education Network (CalREN) with a grant from The H.N. & Frances C. Berger Foundation. The CalREN backbone consists of 2,500 miles of CENIC-owned and managed fiber, plus last-mile fiber.
“Connecting Coachella Valley to the California Research and Education Network will help make the Desert a center of educational innovation and allow us to train hundreds of new teachers and nurses for the future,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell of the $3.4 million, 400-mile high-performance connection.
CalREN is a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the vast majority of the state’s K-20 educational institutions. CalREN consists of a CENIC-operated fiber-optic backbone stretching the length and breadth of California to which CENIC connects schools and other institutions in all 58 of California’s counties via leased circuits obtained from telecom carriers or by CENIC-owned fiber-optic cable.
Two premiere marine research institutions, California State University’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (MLML) and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) will use their connection to CalREN to enable complex ventures such as MBARI’s Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS), which will allow scientists to perform long-term and real-time experiments 900 meters below the surface of Monterey Bay.
It will serve as an engineering, science, and education test bed for even larger regional ocean observatories such as the University of Washington’s NEPTUNE Project.
Nine counties in North Central California may be following the same path as Wireless Silicon Valley which is developing a region-wide wireless network.
The Wireless Sacramento Regional Coalition (WiSac) project (pdf Fact Sheet), plans to develop and deploy a wireless network that will cover nine counties over a 12,000-square-mile area, including Sacramento County, and over 30 municipalities with a combined population of about 3 million, including the city of Sacramento (pop: 450,000).
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