California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and respond to the needs of their faculty, staff, and students.

CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state's K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC's Associate researchers and educators are engaged.

CalREN consists of a CENIC-operated backbone to which schools and other institutions in all 58 of California's counties connect via leased circuits obtained from telecom carriers or fiber-optic cable. In the map to the right, the CalREN backbone fiber network is shown in white, while orange circles indicate network connection points or circuit aggregation facilities.

CENIC is governed by its member institutions. Representatives from these institutions also donate expertise through their participation in various committees designed to ensure that CENIC is managed effectively and efficiently, and to support the continued evolution of the network as technology advances.