There are several key regional and national network initiatives that are of concern and interest to UCI. The UC campuses are connected by UCnet, but are working with CENIC (the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California) to create CalREN-2, a new high speed California network.
vBNS (very high performance Backbone Network Service) is a backbone network already in production that connects research organizations awarded high-performance connections by the NSF. CalREN-2 is connected to vBNS.
UCAID (University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development) is a national collaboration of Universities and other institutions working to advance networking in higher Education via two projects, Internet2 and Abilene.
Internet2 focuses on developing a new family of advanced network applications to meet emerging academic needs. Abilene is a UCAID project to develop an advanced backbone network to connect regional networks.
Find it hard to keep all of these organizations, projects and networks straight? We have created a Web page that should help:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/network/plans/network-initiatives.html