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23 June 2005
The Gigabits are coming!
by Royal Society CEO, Dr Steve Thompson
The Gigabits are coming! After an agonisingly slow start, New Zealand should soon be off to the races with its Advanced Network for researchers, educationalists and the innovation industries, linking these institutions to each other and internationally. The link will speed information around 20,000 times faster than dial-up and 400 times faster than local broadbands.
A typical institution today may have a 100Mbit/sec connection to the internet, but MoRST reckons that an individual researcher would be lucky to maintain a data flow to the desktop of 1Mbit/sec for the 22 hours it would take to transfer 10Gbytes of data. The goal of the Advanced Network is to deliver 100Mbit/sec or more to a desktop. This would deliver 10Gbytes of data in 13 minutes. To achieve this the Network must deliver at least 1Gbit/sec to larger research institutions. Network backbone speeds may exceed 40 Gigabit/sec within a few years.
Last year, MoRST appointed Charles Jarvie, with a background in telecommunications engineering and business management, as implementation manager. MoRST is now considering tenders submitted to ruin the national backbone and local loops. (See http://www.morst.govt.nz/?CHANNEL=IT+INFRASTRUCTURE&PAGE=IT+Infrastructure
).
MoRST says that most commercial networks' charging schemes reflect their focus on 'critical needs' for individual institutions and a pricing premium on bandwidth. The Advanced Network will take a more 'common property approach', with users paying a fee to join the club.
Forty other countries currently have advanced networks, all connected to each other. Currently New Zealand researchers in bioinformatics, bioengineering and biotechnology need better access to global databases of genomic and proteomic data; and not far behind them are the astronomers, particle physicists, mappers, social scientists and virtual animators.
Meanwhile New Zealand's Teradata (a division of NCR) predicts that corporate data volumes could explode over the next few years.
Teradata targets big customers who need a long-term view of large volumes of data, such as The Warehouse, major Australasian banks and Vodafone NZ. The explosion will be driven by new services such as 3G cellphones and radio-frequency identification tags in the supply chain. The finance sector is seeing new rules that are driving an explosion of data that must be stored and explored, and data mining is now a real prospect.
Researchers began the internet for a good reason; they had high communication needs even back in the 80s, but they saw the net move to include commerce. Early fears of a total commercial takeover, where a credit card was demanded to enter every site, didn't transpire, and instead the web has become a democracy verging sometimes on anarchy. While a 'common property' model may help the Advanced Network get off the ground, will the model survive?
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