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May 24, 1999
Office of the President
Plans for a new high-speed Internet2 linkage between California and Mexico were unveiled last week with the endorsement of Governor Gray Davis and Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León.
The two leaders endorsed a joint memorandum of understanding providing for the connection between universities in California and Mexico. The memorandum establishes an agreement for the linkage between California's Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and Mexico's Corporacion Universitaria para el Desarrollo de Internet (CUDI). Officials of the two organizations signed the memorandum along with Davis and Zedillo.
"The new high-speed Internet2 link between institutions of higher education in California and Mexico will enhance collaboration among researchers, teachers and students," Davis said. "It will enrich learning, research, and innovation on both sides of the border."
CENIC is a not-for-profit corporation formed by the University of California, California Institute of Technology, California State University, Stanford University, and University of Southern California to advance the use of communications technology in research and education at California's universities. CUDI performs this role for universities and other research institutions in Mexico.
"Linking together Mexico's and California's advanced networks will enable our universities to share powerful instruments and supercomputers, enrich learning through real-time interactions, share medical research and diagnostic capabilities, and reach into each others' libraries," stated M. Stuart Lynn, chairman of the CENIC board of directors. "Together, we can solve important educational, social, and research problems to improve the lives of people everywhere."
As one of their first projects, CUDI and CENIC will initiate the Virtual Learning Space (VLS), a high-speed computer network using Internet2 technologies that will speed development of digital libraries, distributed computing networks, and the implementation of remote organization-to-organization operation of research laboratories.
The Internet2 initiative is a collaborative effort among 140 universities, private businesses, and the federal government. It is managed by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) which has also entered into a joint memorandum of understanding with CUDI. California's segment of the national Internet2 project is CalREN-2, which links the California CENIC universities together and provides them access to Internet2 universities and organizations worldwide.