CENIC's California Research and Education Network (CalREN) is a multitiered, advanced network-services fabric serving the vast majority of K-20 educational and research institutions in the state. Detailed technical information can be found at the CENIC Network Operations Center.

The CalREN backbone consists of roughly 3,800 miles of CENIC-owned and managed fiber, plus last-mile fiber. Additional network components include:

• 400+ routers,
• 80+ switches,
• 50+ optical components, and
• 300+ managed telco circuits.

Three independent networks operate simultaneously over CalREN. They are:

CalREN-XD:

CENIC's experimental and developmental network, supports bleeding-edge services for network researchers at sites such as the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the University of California Institutes for Science and Innovation, the Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Southern California and its Information Sciences Institute, Stanford University and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, national laboratories and other major network research entities that collaborate with these researchers in California.

CalREN-HPR:

CENIC's high-performance research network, provides leading-edge services for large-application users at CENIC Associates sites. CalREN-HPR connects to the Internet2 Abilene network. The HPR backbone speed is 10 Gb/s.

CalREN-DC:

CENIC's Digital California network, provides high-quality network services for K-20 students/teachers/staff and for faculty, researchers and staff at higher education institutions. CENIC's support of K-12 networking extends the existing CalREN backbone to each of the 58 California counties to facilitate connectivity by California's K-12 schools. With the completion of the CalREN-DC Network Router Refresh, the DC backbone speed has been increased to 10 Gb/s from its previous 2.5 Gb/s.

In addition to providing the entire California research and education community with the most cost-effective advanced services network available, the multitiered CalREN infrastructure supplies high-level network services needed to successfully conduct high-performance research activities. It also provides network researchers in California with the infrastructure needed to conduct critical investigations into optical networking technology.