CENIC News:

Last month, I commented on the just-released report from the Governor's California Broadband Task Force on the state of broadband deployment, availability, and adoption throughout California. This month I'd like to provide some thoughts on national broadband, stimulated by a presentation I heard recently by John Windhausen, Jr., President of Telepoly Consulting.

John's talk was full of interesting information, projections, and incisive recommendations. He referred to research conducted by Nemertes Research suggesting that projections of insufficient network capacity will stifle innovation, primarily in web-based applications but also in many other applications such as telemedicine, telecommunity, HDTV, social networking, legal file sharing, and so on. And of course, predicting other specific uses of technology is always risky – remember the prediction that the primary use of home computers would be the storage of recipes? Almost the only watertight prediction that can be made is that the new applications to come will likely be network-based, making it reasonable to assume some continual growth in network capacity regardless of exactly how steep one believes the growth curve will be.

Windhausen also assembled and presented information on broadband deployment in the US compared to other countries. Although there has been much similar information published in the last few years, Windhausen's presentation took the extra step of gathering growth data not only on the existence of broadband but its penetration and performance, displaying it graphically, and comparing the US to many other nations. This method of presenting broadband growth data throws the disparity between the United States and many other nations with equal or greater economic and geographic challenges into high relief. For example, Windhausen's presentation shows that broadband penetration is much greater in Canada than in the US with average download speeds up to 50% faster than US download speeds, and many nations with a lower GPD and a more dispersed rural population have greater broadband deployment, availability, and adoption than do we.

Windhausen concluded his presentation with a focus on policy, what types of market and government actions will be needed to maximize broadband penetration, and the crucial importance of having an overall national broadband policy in the first place. Windhausen notes that in 2001, Canada adopted a national-level broadband plan in which broadband was treated as infrastructure, similar to electrical or water delivery, roads, and bridges. (Importantly, the Canadian government provided some funding to support broadband as well.) Many other nations were discussed as well, and the position was put forth that these nations are now reaping the benefits of national broadband policies put into motion some 6 to 8 years ago.

In terms of what a US broadband policy might consists of, Windhausen further concludes that market forces only are not sufficient create the necessary investment in broadband facilities since immediate, direct returns are not large enough, and that a new Universal Broadband Fund is necessary to subsidize the construction of local broadband connections to every home and business. His recommendation is that last-mile connectivity be funded in equal thirds from federal funds, state funds, and from the network builder/owner.

One can question whether the specifics of this particular policy recommendation are appropriate for the US. Nevertheless, I consider the conclusion to be of vital importance: in order for the US to be internationally competitive in broadband deployment, some type of central funding is required in addition to the existing commercial entities that would offer services over the infrastructure. How such a fund could be created in the US, and how it would operate to create the needed network infrastructure to keep us from falling even further behind the rest of the world, is of course a vast and complex question. It is however one with which we as a nation must grapple if we are to achieve the levels of broadband deployment -- and the benefits accruing to them as illustrated in the Broadband Task Force report – available elsewhere in the world.

The past few months have been enomrously busy and fruitful for all segments, but I'd like to take some time to concentrate on the upgrades to CalREN connectivity for California's K-12 system. We're delighted to announce the completion of several large ongoing projects to better serve the K12 node sites, the connection points to the CalREN backbone, and ultimately the entire K12 community.

Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) Refresh Project:
K12's CPE refresh effort has been completed, and all original Cisco 7500 series routers have now been retired and replaced with newer and faster Cisco 7200 series routers.

UPS Battery Replacement Project:
CENIC has just ordered the last of the needed replacement battery packs for the UPS units that protect K12 node site routers in case of power outages.

Circuit Upgrades:
To better meet the increasing demands for bandwith, the K12 High Speed Network requested that CENIC upgrade 21 circuits to Gigabit speeds. Of these 21 Gigabit circuit upgrades, all 21 have now been put into production on the CalREN-DC network. The final two Gigabit circuit upgrades, as marked, were completed before the end of February. CENIC and K12 have already identified and prioritized the next groups of circuit upgrades.

• Alameda COE to San Mateo COE (completed!)
• San Mateo COE to Sunnyvale Backbone Node Site (completed!)
• San Francisco COE to Sunnyvale Backbone Node Site
• San Francisco COE to Marin COE
• Merced COE to San Joaquin COE
• Stanislaus COE to Merced Backbone Node Site
• Ventura COE to Los Angeles Backbone Node Site
• Butte COE to Corning Backbone Node Site
• El Dorado COE to Sacramento Backbone Node Site
• Contra Costa COE to Marin COE
• Santa Clara COE to Alameda COE
• Placer COE to Sacramento Backbone Node Site
• San Diego COE to San Diego Backbone Node Site
• Riverside COE to Riverside Backbone Node Site
• Contra Costa COE to Oakland Backbone Node Site
• Solano COE to Sunnyvale Backbone Node Site
• San Bernardino CSS to Riverside Backbone Node Site
• Sonoma COE to Oakland Backbone Node Site
• Santa Clara COE to Sunnyvale Backbone Node Site
• Fresno COE to Fresno Backbone Node Site
• Los Angeles COE to Los Angeles Backbone Node Site

In addition to these upgrades for the K-12 system, the California State University campus at San Bernardino also received a CENIC-managed fiber connection to the Riverside backbone node site, located at UC Riverside. An OC-3 to the Los Angeles node site provides diversity. Other projects for the CSU system and California's Community colleges are in various stages, so be sure to keep an eye out for future issues of CENIC Today to stay up to date about them and other exciting developments.

Half a world away in the Middle East, where fresh water is scarce and access to it is hotly contested, a small town wonders whether its water supply is healthy and safe. Cheap, reliable, disposable bio-sensors that test for organic pollutants and return fast, clear results would go a long way to enabling that small town (or nearby big city) to judge the safety of their water supply and what might need to be done to ensure it. For countries like Jordan, Oman, Iraq, and others in the Middle East, who are often heavily dependent on aquifers and using more than 100% of their replenishable water supply, such considerations are urgent. Even in California where organic pollutants are increasing in the Colorado River, by which the thirst of much of southern California is sated, concerns like this will only become more and more pressing as time passes.

Bio-engineering researchers at UCLA, the Jordan University of Science and Technology in Amman, Jordan, the Egyptian National Science and Technical Information Network (ENSTINET) in Cairo, Egypt, and the National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA collaborate and share knowledge on the bio-sensors needed to make this vision a reality, crucial in today's increasingly conservation-oriented world. On February 28, 2008 at 8:30AM PST, the medium via which they came together for this purpose was high-quality videoconferencing, made possible in part by CalREN and other high-performance research and education networks, and managed by Arif Khan at the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Readers of CENIC Today will also recognize the name of the man who accomplished the social networking needed to make the videoconference possible -- the peripatetic Ed Johansen, always an expert in, as he puts it, "getting the right people to the table."

This time, the "right people" consisted of the following:

• UCLA Professor/Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Harold Monbouquette and graduate student in the Monbouquette laboratory Vanessa Tolosa from the UCLA Visualization Portal, shown above at left
• Assistant Professor at Jordan University of Science and Technology (and `04 Monbouquette lab alum) Naser Hamdi and Chair of the university's Biomedical Engineering Department Rami Oweis from Amman, Jordan
• ENSTINET Director Ola Wagieh Laurence from Cairo, Egypt
• Egyptian Embassy Science Adviser Maha Kamel, Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation Board Chair and University of Maryland Professor Donald Riley, and Senior Program Manager at the NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering Osman Shinaishin from the NSF in Arlington, VA

all of whom can be seen in the photograph at right, where participating locations listed clockwise from the top left are Cairo, Arlington, the Ohio Supercomputer Center, and Amman. Video clarity during the entire videoconference was stunning, with no stuttering or pixelation and no perceptible delay, a fact which a favorably impressed Dr. Monbouquette commented on afterwards. During the videoconference, clear and legible slide presentations were shared from Jordan and UCLA which included finely detailed photomicrographs and plots discussing not only the design but the manufacture of bio-sensors as well. Potentially valuable insights were gained by all participants on how to improve the fabrication and use of such devices, mere millimeters in size and sensitive to a variety to biologically originating compounds. Considerations include sensor shape, electrode geometry, methods for depositing sensing materials and other fabrication issues, and how to break a complex signal into its component parts in order to judge the concentrations of a variety of compounds in a given sample.

Questions of funding were also addressed, which were of considerable use and interest to all parties and an excellent example of an issue that can benefit from high-quality videoconferencing and both the technical and social networking that makes it possible. The NSF's Dr. Shinaishin shared information about the Foundation's interest in domestic research projects with international scope, which was met with warmth and enthusiasm by Drs. Monbouquette, Hamdi, and Oweis. ENSTINET Director Laurence was particularly keen to learn more about the NSF's activities regarding science education projects, of powerful interest to her and to Egypt's First Lady Suzanne Mubarak.

Further, another opportunity to take advantage of high-quality videoconferencing was identified by all parties during a March workshop to take place in Tanzania, and everyone present agreed on the enormous benefit to collaboration and research that such videoconferences bring, presenting as they do the ability to share information firsthand, not only about research but also about how to support it.

CENIC serves a very well-defined community, California's K-20 researchers and educators. That community, however, has a global scope and vision. Through all of you and the advances you pursue, CENIC is put in the enviable position of facilitating innovations like those discussed at the UCLA Visualization Portal and other locations around the world on February 28, innovations which have the potential to improve the lives of people half a world away, who may never even have heard of CalREN.

Stay tuned for more information on future videoconferences facilitated by Ed Johansen and made possible by the kind of high-performance networking brought to California's K-20 R&E community by CENIC.

Final preparations are underway for CENIC 08: Lightpath to the Stars, and next week beginning on Sunday evening, the best and brightest of the California research & education community and many of their colleagues from around the world will come together to share their knowledge of network research and the applications that high-performance networking supports.

Among those attending will be the 2008 winners of CENIC's Innovations in Networking Awards. With this award, CENIC seeks to highlight network applications by identifying exemplary innovations that leverage the network and have the potential to improve the way instruction and research is conducted, even when the impact of the innovation may not be felt immediately.

CENIC will present the awards on Tuesday March 11, 2008, at the Oakland Marriott City Center hotel and convention center. Award winners will also be given the opportunity to present and discuss their application in a special session at the conference.

This year's award winners include:

Educational Applications:
CAHSEE: Stepping into your Future

High-Performance Research Applications:
Pac-10 Internet Video Exchange Project

Experimental/Developmental Applications:
CineGrid and UltraLight (tie)

Gigabit/Broadband Applications:
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's California Broadband Task Force

CENIC is also pleased to announce Jerry Keith of UC Riverside as the 2008 winner of the award for Outstanding Individual Achievement.

Award winners will be giving presentations about their respective projects on Tuesday as well; check out the conference program to learn more, and if you haven't yet registered, do so now! See you next week in Oakland, CA!

National Networking News:

The 8th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop will be held on 1-2 October 2008 at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center, in Seattle, WA. At the website, you can find information about the workshop itself, accomodations (including special discounted room rates!), and obtaining travel visas for attendees from outside the United States.

When the Large Hadron Collider starts up at CERN in 2008, the world will be waiting to receive the data it produces. In Canada, researchers will be looking to TRIUMF, Canada's particle and nuclear physics national laboratory.

TRIUMF is host to one of eleven Tier-1 centers, forming an integral part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid collaboration and supporting the particle detector experiment, ATLAS, one of the LHC-powered experiments.

Beginning this spring, Starbucks Card holders can enjoy up to two hours of free Wi-Fi service per day at Starbucks locations offering Wi-Fi access, while more than 12 million qualifying AT&T broadband and AT&T U-verse(SM) Internet customers will have unlimited free access to the Wi-Fi service. In addition, more than 5 million of AT&T's remote access services business customers will be able to access Wi-Fi service at Starbucks locations. AT&T will soon extend the benefits of Wi-Fi at Starbucks to its wireless customers.

"People want to stay connected to their world 24/7, and Wi-Fi hot spots, broadband and wireless make that mobility possible," said Rick Welday, AT&T chief marketing officer.

State Farm's national 30-member Youth Advisory Board has awarded $486,045 in grants to five new California service-learning programs. The board awarded the grants after reviewing more than 30 applications from California schools and community-based organizations, in addition to over 300 requests for funding that were received from program sponsors in the United States and several Canadian provinces.

Faced with increased security concerns, especially in light of recent school shootings across the US, educators are looking for new ways to improve their campus security systems -- and converging physical security tools on their campus computer network is the latest trend they are turning to.

At the Campus Safety Conference in California on Feb. 20, officials from Cisco Systems discussed the importance of converging a school's physical security tools on its network, which they said schools are now doing at an unprecedented pace.

Twenty-five-time Grammy Award winning performer Stevie Wonder will present California State University, Northridge (CSUN) with the CSU's first "Accessible Technology Pioneer Award" March 12 during the campus's 23rd Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference, which takes place March 10-15.

The award, which will be accepted by CSUN President Dr. Jolene Koester, will be presented during a reception that will take place from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at the Renaissance Montura Hotel at LAX.

CSU Northridge is being honored by the CSU Office of the Chancellor's Accessible Technology Initiative staff for the success of the conference in advancing the field of accessible technology by bringing together the foremost academic experts, technology innovators and companies, and consumer advocates in one venue. The school is also home to a globally renowned Deaf Studies program.

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.

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