Fran Foo | August 04, 2008
RESEARCHERS and academics in Australia have been given a ten-fold bandwidth boost thanks to a network upgrade by Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARNet).
AARNet has spent about $1 million upgrading its network, says CEO Chris Hancock
"At this speed, it's about 10,000 times faster than normal ADSL2+ connections," AARNet chief executive Chris Hancock said.
Mr Hancock said around $1 million was spent on the infrastructure, including an upgrade of core Cisco switches and Juniper routers.
AARNet's Perth and Canberra offices began testing the new capacity in the last month, he said.
"We have customers ready and eager to take this up," Mr Hancock said, nominating the Australian National University, Sydney University, Melbourne University, CSIRO and University of New South Wales as frontrunners.
"And it won't be a big upgrade in price for them."
Universities and research institutes pay a yearly subscription fee for high-speed internet access from AARNet. La Trobe University's cost, for instance, is $750,000 for about 30,000 users.
Also, 38 local universities and the CSIRO are AARNet shareholders.
Mr Hancock believes the new links will bode well to heighten Australia's visibility, especially internationally, as local researchers will have the ability to participate in projects that require large amounts of bandwidth. In particular, he highlighted the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and electronic very long baseline interferometry observations (e-VLBI) projects.
Australia is in a two-horse race with South Africa to build the $2 billion, next-generation SKA radio telescope while CSIRO scientists are leading the charge with e-VLBI which uses telescopes hundreds or thousands of kilometres apart to simultaneously form a single, co-ordinated system.
In a June trial, scientists from CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility and their Chinese and Japanese counterparts worked together, albeit remotely, to control radio telescopes at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Kashima, Japan, and similar equipment in Parkes, Coonabarabran and Narrabri in NSW -- streaming data in real time from five telescopes.