CENIC's California Research & Education Network Supports Historic US-India Summit on Education, Research, and Technology.

CYPRESS, Calif. -- The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) today announced that the California Research and Education Network (CalREN) was used to enable a HDTV videoconference between the President of India, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, and 250 attendees at yesterday's US-India Summit on Education, Research, and Technology at the University of California, San Diego.

In order to facilitate the high rate of data exchange that this event required, CENIC provided 1 Gigabit of bandwidth across its high-performance CalREN-XD network from San Diego to Los Angeles, plus connectivity through its provision of the Pacific Wave international peering facility in Los Angeles.

The videoconference took place between the Presidential Palace in Delhi, India and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) on the University of California, San Diego campus. During the two-way conference, one high-bandwidth signal was sent from Delhi to San Diego as President Kalam delivered the summit's keynote address, and a separate signal was sent from Calit2 to Delhi for a question-and-answer session between the two sites.

"With a population of over a billion people, India is the world's largest democracy, and cooperation and collaboration between India and the US will have enormous positive consequences for research and education in California and worldwide," said Jim Dolgonas, President and Chief Operating Office for CENIC. "Employing CalREN to support events like this and future research and educational collaborations is therefore a central part of our mission on behalf of the California research and education community."

The one-day event included 250 invited officials from industry, academe, government and non-governmental organizations in India and the United States. Guests included India's Minister for Science and Technology, Kapil Sibal as well as UC President Robert C. Dynes, UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox, Chief Executive of Qualcomm Paul E. Jacobs, and former Chairman and CEO of Nortel Bill Owens, among others. The program focused on economic and educational collaborative opportunities in a variety of areas, as well as an examination of the future evolution of the relationship between India and the United States.

About CENIC

California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under the umbrella of a nonprofit corporation known as 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. To learn more, visit http://www.cenic.org/.