CENIC Completes Migration to H.323 for All California Community Colleges

17 April 2006, Cypress, CA . The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) announced today that it has completed the migration of the California Community Colleges to CalREN Video Services (CVS). With the completion of this multi-year project, all community college campuses in the state are now H.323-enabled. The H.323 standard provides a foundation for multimedia communications across IP-based networks, such as the commercial Internet and CENIC's high-performance California Research and Education Network (CalREN). By complying with H.323, multimedia products and applications from multiple vendors can interoperate, allowing users to communicate without concern for compatibility.

Through CVS, CENIC offers Video-over-IP services to over 140 educational sites throughout the state, including the California State University system, the California Community College system, the University of California system, and a number of K-12 schools. These services are delivered over CalREN, the high-bandwidth, high-capacity network to which the vast majority of California's K-20 educational institutions are connected and which is designed, implemented, and maintained by CENIC. CalREN supports Quality of Service (QoS), an advanced networking capability that CENIC uses to ensure superior quality for videoconferencing.

"This is a significant achievement for CENIC and the California Community College system," said Catherine McKenzie, Lead Specialist, Information Systems and Analysis at the California Community College Chancellor's Office. "Thanks to the hard work of both organizations, researchers and educators in the state.s community colleges will be able to collaborate much more seamlessly with their colleagues within the system and beyond as well."

"CENIC is proud to have completed this project and offer H.323-enabled video services to all of California's community college campuses," said Jim Dolgonas, President and Chief Operating Officer of CENIC. "It's a major milestone both for us and for the community college system, who were wonderful partners in achieving it. We look forward to working with the campuses so that they can take full advantage of the benefits of next-generation Video-over-IP."

The next step for CENIC's CVS will be the implementation of a software program to provide state-wide scheduling of videoconferences by all campuses. The ability for each participating site to reserve resources for videoconferencing will move CVS even further into the forefront of delivering high-performance IP-based services to California's research and education community.

About CENIC

California's higher 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 answer 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.

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.