CENIC News

Like the schools, colleges, and Universities of which it's composed, CENIC is on a July 1 through June 30 fiscal year. As such, we have expressed our thanks to Board members whose terms have ended, welcomed new Board members, and engaged in planning activities for the coming year.

Leaving the Board at the end of June was Don McNelis of Butte County Office of Education, whom the board thanked for his service. Replacing Don for the K12 community is Darryl LaGace of the San Diego Unified School District. And shortly after the beginning of the new fiscal year, Amir Dabirian, previously of the California State University Chancellor's Office and now with Cal State Fullerton, departed the Board and was replaced by Bruce Briggs, also of the CSU Chancellor's Office. Finally, on July 1, the Board welcomed Richard Katz as an outside Board member. Many CENIC Today readers may know Richard from his many years as Vice President of EDUCAUSE and the father of ECAR, the research service of Educause.

The CENIC Board of Directors also engaged in its annual day-and-a-half long planning retreat this past July. Out of the retreat came five new initiatives for exploration during the year which I'd like to share with the CENIC community:

1. Exploration of the suitability and feasibility of a VoIP service offering from CENIC

The CalREN infrastructure has the statewide footprint and membership to implement a VoIP offering for Associates. Potential benefits include:

• Significant reduction in in-state long distance charges for participating sites;
• When replacing an aging phone private branch exchange (PBX), a VoIP solution can be less costly to acquire and manage;
• IP telephony offers an expanded feature set compared to traditional PBX and Centrex solutions;
• Centrally provided VoIP services would leverage the collective and individual Charter Associate investments in IP infrastructure;
• Leveraging centralized call management and control services eliminates the need for each site to establish and maintain these services and their related technical infrastructure;
• Leveraging centralized call management and control services also eliminates the need for each site to hire and train the related staff to operate the system;
• Aggregation of on-premises equipment purchases (desk sets, etc.) through CENIC can reduce the cost of equipment acquisition;
• Participating Charter Associates can more easily maintain technological currency; and
• Directing additional revenue to VoIP service providers who are already providing non-VoIP services to CENIC may have cost advantages for those other services.

2. Exploration of Identity Management as a CENIC service

Identity management has been a critical issue to educational institutions for several years. Fortunately, great strides have been made such that the challenges are now more related to deployment and policy than to technology. The areas of possible interest expressed at the retreat were policy and the necessity for and benefits of a CENIC-wide deployment, particularly of an Eduroam server. Potential benefits include:

• Centralizing services within CENIC may eliminate the need for Charter Associates to acquire or maintain expertise and infrastructure in this area; and
• Some segments may find that using an externally-hosted service will help address the development of an acceptable set of policies and guidelines.

3. Brokering legitimate entertainment services

Several Board members expressed an interest CENIC brokering various entertainment services, such as Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu. Potential benefits include:

• Centralizing services through a CENIC offering would free individual Associate sites from having to broker separate agreements and handle copyright- and IP-related issues on a one-at-a-time basis; and
• The Higher Education Opportunity Act requires to demonstrate that they making a legal service available to students. Centralizing these services through CENIC may simplify this process.

Certain of these media services are already offered for free. In other cases, it is necessary to determine if there is enough interest in paid services among CENIC Associates to warrant CENIC brokering services. Of particular note is how CENIC members would pay for any such brokered services – that is, whether they would be centrally funded site licenses or discounted services offered to individual subscribers.

4. Data Center Colocation Services

As interest in reducing the costs of data center services increases, and as cloud services become more accepted as a delivery option, CENIC members are interested in investigating whether CENIC can provide services more effectively than if members were to contract directly with cloud providers, without CENIC serving as a broker or within their segments. The CSU and UC are already studying the benefits of working across institutions within their segments to achieve economies of scale.

5. Extension of CalREN via use of wireless technologies

There are many reasons to investigate providing Internet services to areas currently not served by CENIC. For example, the San Diego Unified School District is interested in the provision of wireless services to all students of the district, as a means of increasing equity of access. Emergency responders and public safety personnel could also benefit from availability of wireless services. The discussion at the retreat focused on the thought of extending CalREN with wireless services to serve these and other needs.

Each of these initiatives will be studied for potential introduction as CENIC services. CENIC will rely heavily on the resources of Board members and advisory council members (the DC Technical Advisory Council, the HPR Technical Advisory Council and the Business Advisory Council) in developing recommended action in each of these areas.

In the June 1 issue of CENIC Today, we mentioned CENIC's ongoing network-wide efforts to optimize overall connectivity as well as connectivity individual Associates in terms of cost-effectiveness, reliability, and performance. One such continued effort involves a large-scale analysis and consolidation of Associate traffic on circuits used by certain sites to connect to the CalREN backbone. Much of the project working during the month of August dealt with the consolidation of such traffic and the installation of new point-to-point replacement circuits throughout the network. Keep an eye out for future issues of CENIC Today for more updates!

In addition to this continuing effort, two new connections to CalREN were completed, a 100 Mbps upgrade for the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton West Campus and a 10 Gigabit connection to CalREN for the San Diego Unified School District.

By now readers of CENIC Today may have heard the good news about the Central Valley Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure Project (CVNGBIP) being awarded $46.6 million in stimulus funding by the federal government through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), NTIA.

The 18 counties targeted for broadband infrastructure through CVNGBIP are Amador, Calaveras, Colusa, El Dorado, Fresno, Kings, Kern, Mariposa, Merced, Madera, Nevada, Placer, Tuolumne, Tulare, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Sutter, and Yuba.

This project was designed and developed by the private-public partnership of CVIN, LLC (the Central Valley Independent Network) and CENIC. We believe that the widespread support from various groups and constituencies in these counties helped make the case for this funding, and we thank them for that support and hope it will continue to grow as we prepare to launch actual implementation.

The total project costs are projected at $66.6 million. In addition to the NTIA grant, equal to 70% of the costs, the affiliated members of CVIN, LLC have committed $13.2 million in cash for a 20% match. We are now awaiting favorable action by the California Public Utilities Commission to provide a 10% match, or $6.6 million from the CASF. We are hopeful for positive action soon so we can officially begin implementation.

The Central Valley Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure Project involves building, operating, and maintaining a fiber-optic network infrastructure that will traverse 1,371 miles of California's Central Valley in addition to last-mile wireless capability over parts of four counties (Fresno, Kern, Kings, and Tulare). Initially, the CVNGBIP will focus on connecting community anchor institutions via fiber, including 19 county offices of education sites, 14 community college sites, 3 California State University campuses, 20 county/main libraries, and 7 public safety sites. Once connected, these non-profit anchor institutions will be supported by CENIC and become an integral part of CENIC's statewide CalREN network, a nearly 3,000-mile fiber-optic-based advanced network that has been serving California's K-20 public research and education institutions since 1997, and one of the most advanced networks of its kind in the world.

CVIN will utilize the new infrastructure for commercial purposes enabling businesses, residences, and county, local, state, and federal government agencies located in the listed counties to purchase a full range of telecommunications services. These services will be offered by CVIN directly, or by CVIN Affiliates and other local telecommunications providers with whom CVIN has strategic relationships.

The partner organizations together share an immense amount of expertise in the deployment and operation of advanced communications and network services throughout California. CVIN, LLC is a joint enterprise comprised of affiliates of eight Independent Telephone Companies located in central and northern California. These companies cover over 7,000 square miles and operate more than 1,700 miles of fiber and have vast experience in providing broadband services. Many of these companies are over 100 years old. On behalf of nearly all of California's K-20 research and education community, CENIC currently owns and operates the California Research & Education Network (CalREN), an ultra-high-performance fiber-optic network infrastructure consisting of nearly 3,000 miles of CENIC-owned fiber extending from the Mexican border to Corning and San Diego into Arizona which is the largest and most robust statewide optical network for education in the nation reach nearly 10 million K-20 students, faculty, and staff.

Further information about the Central Valley Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure Project can be found at www.cvngbip.org.

CENIC operates multiple connections to the commodity Internet from CalREN, allowing Associates to send and receive traffic to sites on the general Internet, and thanks to CENIC, the price of such traffic has been steadily falling for the past decade. In May 2002, CENIC’s aggregation of traffic drove the cost down to $260 per Megabit per month, and in July 2002, lowered it again to $210. July 2003 CENIC pushed it down to $126, and then to $95 in July 2004. In a further cost savings to Associates due to CENIC's peering relationships which are not volume-sensitive, the total traffic sent via the more cost-effective commodity peering exceeded that sent by ISP connections by July 2005, reducing the effective cost per Megabit of traffic.

Now, as a result of continued aggregation and negotiations, ISP traffic has become quite literally too cheap to meter and more cost-effective to provide as a bundled service for Charter Associates. As a result, from $260/Meg/month in 2002, CENIC Charter Associates now enjoy unmetered access to the commodity Internet, the cost of which to CENIC is low enough to include in their annual Charter Associate fees.  For non-Charter Associates, commodity traffic is still measured but the cost has dropped to $5/Meg/month. Says CENIC irector of Network Engineering and Design Brian Court, "Years ago at the CSU, I remember [current CENIC Chief Technology Officer] Dave Reese and myself celebrating when these charges went below $500 per Meg per month!"

From charging $500 per Mbps per month to unmetered is a long way, and CENIC has made stewardship of the resources entrusted to us by the California research and education community a central part of its defining values. Pursuing opportunities to lower costs and transfer the most network traffic for the least amount of money for a ten-million-strong user base has been a significant part of that and one in which we take pride. CENIC continues to pursue other avenues to provide the most for the least to all our Associates and will keep the CENIC community up-to-date on the latest efforts in this vein.

One of the most useful -- and used -- technology tools for California's Community Colleges is CCC Confer, a free service through which anyone in the California Community College system can create and manage conference calls, web conferences, live office hours, remote interactive classrooms, web-based seminars, and more, all enhanced with the rich media content that requires a reliable, high-performance network like CalREN.

Administered by Palomar College, CCC Confer allows for planned and impromptu meetings of two or more people, either by telephone (Call Confer) or by using both the phone and the World Wide Web to share content (Meet & Confer). With Web conferencing, users can share content (PowerPoint slides, documents, etc.), co-browse the Web, share applications, poll an audience, or use the whiteboard for taking notes. It also includes public and private chat features and the ability to archive the entire session. Some faculty use this for teaching classes, and others for holding Office Hours with students, and CCC Confer also facilitates a lot of organizational meetings, professional development, and tutorial applications. This flexibility and freedom, offered as a free CCC services makes CCC Confer the web-based teaching, training, and communications tool of choice for faculty and staff serving a student base of over three million individuals.

The CCC Confer project is located at Palomar College in San Marcos, is funded from a grant from the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, and is under the directorship of this month's Featured Star Performer, education technology guru Blaine Morrow. Blaine arrived at Palomar College from Michigan State University, where he was on the faculty at the College of Education and served as director of several state-wide educational technology projects, including an after-school computer clubhouse program, a tele-mentoring program, a technology training program for faculty, and a Web-based literacy environment. Blaine was also on the faculty of Wayne State University's Information Science department and have been a technology director at three districts.

He is also the director of 3C Media Solutions, the educational media distribution network dedicated to assisting the California Community Colleges with the most up-to-date media solutions available. 3C Media Solutions delivers media content throughout the CCC system 24/7, through television and the internet, including high-quality, digital broadcasts through two channels, 3CTV and 3C Community Network.

Educational technology specialists like Blaine Morrow ensure that all users of advanced networks and not only big-science researchers obtain the most benefit from them, as well as acting as a force for innovation by constantly pushing the envelope of what the network and the applications that use it can deliver.

To learn more about the other Star Performers that CENIC has featured, please visit our website at www.cenic.org.

US & World Networking News:

NLR has deployed a 10-Gbps backbone network on NLR's advanced, fiber-optic or Layer 1 infrastructure, NLR WaveNet, to support the Enterprise GENI research track, which uses the OpenFlow standard as a networking substrate. This new backbone network will initially interconnect five participating university campuses – Stanford University, Clemson University, Georgia Tech, Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Earlier this month, researchers and computer experts gathered in Pittsburgh for TeraGrid '10, the annual conference organized and sponsored by TeraGrid.

Not everyone could attend, of course, so it's a good thing that the proceedings are now available online at the ACM Digital Library.

Support for telehealth as a viable healthcare delivery model received an enormous boost on August 17 when Calif. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and U.S. chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra joined a diverse group of statewide healthcare and technology agencies to launch the California Telehealth Network (CTN), the largest broadband network dedicated to telehealth in the nation.

The Foundation for California Community Colleges is proud to announce California Connects, a new program that will increase digital literacy and expand broadband Internet access to underserved populations throughout the state. The program is funded by a $10.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration for Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP).

Butte College in Northern California says it has become the first and only "grid positive" college in the nation, producing more clean energy than it uses. The college is poised to become the largest collegiate producer of solar power in the world, generating enough electricity to power 9,200 homes.

About CENIC and How to Change Your Subscription:

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 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.

For more information, visit www.cenic.org.

Subscription Information: You can subscribe and unsubscribe to CENIC Today at http://lists.cenic.org/mailman/listinfo/cenic-today.