Membership in CalREN includes many benefits far beyond what can be provided by a conventional ISP for cost-effective network fees, including:

• Highly reliable, high-speed Internet connectivity among schools and colleges in California;


• No commercial Internet costs when communicating with California's educational institutions connected to CalREN and with hundreds of national educational institutions who belong to Internet2, National LambdaRail, and other organizations with whom CENIC has a network peering relationship.


• A Network Operations Center (NOC) that understands educational institutions and was formed to meet the needs of such organizations — ready to provide advanced network services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.


• An estimated savings of 50% or more on commodity/commercial ISP charges, realized as a result of peering arrangements with numerous commercial firms. In addition, traffic from K-20 entities in California can reach K-20 entities in 36 other states at no additional cost.


• A "ring" architecture-designed backbone to allow network traffic to travel on one of two paths to achieve the highest levels of reliability.


• If desired, the ability to provide diverse connections from a campus to an alternate CalREN hub site.


• Participation with other research and educational institutions in networking issues, via various CENIC-sponsored events.


• Many research opportunities, such as those offered by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) require access to advanced, high-speed networks like CalREN.


• National and global collaboration with other researchers and educators via highly reliable, uncongested Internet services through an optical backbone infrastructure resulting in the lowest latency network services to other major research and education institutions.

CENIC also provides a variety of services to its Associates, from teleconferencing via K20Video.org to network consulting.

For questions about becoming a member of CENIC, please send e-mail to info@cenic.org.