CENIC - One Gigabit of Bust
Thomas W. West, President
CENIC
Voice: 562.346.2280
Email: twest@cenic.org
Julie M. Van Fleet
Voice: 619.276.0090
Email: julie@cenic.org
One Gigabit or Bust
Los Alamitos, CA - July 24, 2002 - Delivering robust end-to-end broadband Internet capabilities to every education institution, business, and home is the focus of California's Next Generation Internet (NGI) Roundtable and Centers initiative. The State of California has awarded $2 million to the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) to focus on speeding One Gigabit broadband to all Californians by 2010, or in California "shorthand," One Gigabit or Bust.
Through CENIC's NGI Roundtable and Centers initiative, industry, public interest organizations, and educational institutions, as well as local, state and federal governments, catalyze a state-wide intellectual hot bed and first-of-a-kind technology test bed for realizing "first mile" solutions to speed the deployment of one Gigabit per second, or Gbps (i.e., one billion bits per second). The goal of one Gigabit per second (Gbps) represents more than a thousand-fold increase from today's commercial DSL and cable networks.
The NGI program is unique to California. It has two major components. As a central part of its grant from the California Technology, Trade and Commerce Agency's Division of Science, Technology, and Innovation, CENIC supports the continuation of two California NGI Centers. The Centers create a collaborative environment to house and foster the development, testing, incubation and demonstration of new business applications designed specifically to take advantage of the features and performance of the next generation of the Internet -
- CalNGI is the State's Southern Center hosted by the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego.
- Net21 is the State's Northern Center hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, under the auspices of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).
Through the two Centers, organizations can engage in R&D activities and projects that can stimulate the broader, national build-out of the NGI infrastructure.
The second component of NGI involves creating the NGI Roundtable which will address the critical technical, policy, financial, and organizational issues as well as identify appropriate organizations or groups to develop solutions. Under the grant, CENIC will facilitate the development of a comprehensive strategy that defines the future of high-performance networking for research, education, and commerce in California -- maximizing one of the state's key economic forces for the future. The CENIC NGI Roundtable offers opportunities for involvement and support for organizations and individuals that have a stake in a viable Next Generation Internet.
Tom West, CENIC's president, noted "We've got a powerful partnership comprised of experienced and motivated people representing scientific and commercial organizations; local, state and federal governments; community-based organizations; and universities to address the challenges and to achieve our goal. Furthermore, the range of California's population, geographical and economic characteristics makes it a microcosm of the national challenges in rolling out one Gbps broadband capabilities across the nation."
CENIC is a not-for-profit corporation formed by the California Institute of Technology, the California State University, Stanford University, the University of California, and the University of Southern California to facilitate and coordinate the deployment, development, and operation of a set of seamless and robust advanced network services. Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, and Pacific Bell are CENIC's Associate Partners.
More information about CENIC can be found at www.cenic.org.
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