# Channel

## Introduction

A Channel is a private 'subnet' of communication between two or more specific Client Organizations, allowing for data isolation and confidentiality by providing a Channel-specific ledger. The ledger is shared across the peers in the channel, and transacting parties must be authenticated to the channel in order to interact with it.

One can think of a channel as the Network implementation of a Consortium. However, as a Consortium might be associated with more than one Channel (for instance in the case where different ledgers are needed, or in the case where only a subset of a Consortium’s Organizations need to transact and one does not want to implement a specific Consortium for that purpose) this is not a one-to-one correspondence.

<figure><img src="/files/oWB7G5y3SdTmEwhNKr26" alt=""><figcaption><p>Channel seen in the IDE</p></figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="/files/9KlYryuPm0PiZm2TzSWd" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

## Configuration

In AKB once a consortium is defined, a channel will automatically be generated and all the client organizations already associated with that consortium will automatically join the channel (this is just for convenience, one is free to select any subset of the Consortium’s members as Channel members). However, you can always edit the channel configuration by double clicking on it and proceed with the settings:

* **Name**: defines the channel’s name and it must contain only alphanumeric characters or '\_' and be 20 characters at most;
* **Members**: defines which Organizations are part of this Channel (they must also be part of the Consortium associated to the Channel).


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