Connecting the Future logo

line Home | Program | Speakers | Abstracts | Contact us line

  Abstracts

Hey, I've got TransACT - now what?
Paul Brooks

The TransACT broadband network now covers over thirty percent of Canberra, and has achieved a consumer takeup rate second only to Korea in the world. Why is TransACT successful? What is the Canberra population using the network for? And what services are in the pipeline?

Sydney Basin Fibre Infrastructure Project
Keith Burston

The Sydney Basin Fibre Infrastructure Project is a joint initiative of the five Sydney based Universities. It will provide gigabit rate interconnections between the Universities, the national AARNet backbone, the Australian Technology Park, CSIRO and (eventually) various other organisations, such as libraries, museums and so on, who share similar research, education and cultural interests. The project will mesh with the CSIRO CENTIE project, and shares fibre capacity at various points. Completion is expected in the second half of this year.

Smart Networks for a Smarter Internet
Joe Chicharo

This presentation examines a future broadband Internet which is ubiquitous in nature and is seamlessly accessible from anywhere. A major challenge is to ensure that the Internet is easy to use via natural user interfaces through a broad range of mobile devices and multimodal interactions. An essential ingredient will be to embed intelligence (via smart digital personal assistants) within the internet to enable personalisation of services and hence make it easier for users perform whatever tasks they may wish.

The future broadband internet infrastructure needs to support a wide range of on-line services that may need to be rapidly activated and deactivated. Hence the network infrastructure needs to be extremely flexible. The best way to provide a flexible network infrastructure is to make it programmable by using an open architecture paradigm whereby the software is separated from the hardware. This process will open up the network infrastructure to third party development thus potentially delivering a much richer set of network enhanced functionality and capability, that is; a smarter network.

Network Evolution: Considerations in Large Scale Network Planning
Narelle Clark

Much of the talk in today's world of Internetworking involves the concept of ubiquity. Networks should be everywhere, and for everyone, but these concepts hold a number of challenges for those building and operating such networks. Challenges become questions such as "How much and what type of technology do I use?", "How much bandwidth?", "How do I manage this?", "How do I activate my customers?" "How do I bill for this?" and so on. In the current investment climate these challenges are subject to even greater scrutiny than before. This talk will offer a view on the big issues in big networks today.

The Agile Communications Rural Broadband Network
Simon Hackett

Agile has constructed one of the first non-Telstra, long haul broadband data and voice networks in rural Australia. The network serves as a potential model for providing competition and alternatives in telecommunications in rural Australian areas.

This presentation discusses the motivations, implementation experience, and outcomes of the creation of the network.

Australia's Internet Future - International Dimensions
Tony Hill

Australia is facing a major second wave of Internet capacity based on new Internet technologies and broadband applications. In Australia the Internet began as a research and education network. Business and individuals discovered the 'usefulness' of the Internet. Now research and education networks overseas are showing the way to even greater Internet based capacities.

Users have driven much of the advance in interoperability and standards development for the Internet. We need to ensure that Australia is well positioned to get best use from the next wave of Internet technologies. Broadband services need to provide an effective platform for these technologies. Some Australian organisations are already showing how advanced Internet technology can be applied. ISOC-AU will continue to play a role in making sure Australians are well informed of overseas developments and that there is an effective users voice in the public and policy debate over Internet technology.

Where are all those Broadband customers?
Chris Howells

To qualify the perspective, a short introduction to the heritage, structure and partners of Redfern Photonics leads into a brief but biassed analysis of what were the key success factors in Redfern's fairly rapid emergence on the local development capital scene in Australia. Redfern has raised a bit short of a quarter of a A$Billion over the past two or so years and represents maybe one of the largest private equity capital raisings in recent Australian commercial experience. Most of that is at work in eight or so new companies building photonics businesses whose products are hopefully to be consumed by "Broadband" customers.

However the current Global Telco Meltdown (or nuclear winter or firestorm - call it what you will, but the market is very very unwell) presents huge changes to environmental pressures bearing on strategies across the whole R&D/IP and customer scene. What can Australia do about this? Some unsolicited advice to Government, the R&D community and businesses at large...

The Global Terabit Network
George McLaughlin

In recent years a number of successful national and multi-national advanced high speed research networks have been developed and deployed, notably Internet2's Abilene and the Canadian CANET-3 network. Multi-nationally, Europe upgraded the pan-European network to the multi-gigabit GEANT network. Asia has seen the emergence of the APAN consortium which, though it has yet to build a true multi-national high performance network, is moving in this direction.

Inter-continentally the situation has left something to be desired. There is now a move to addressing this by developing a persistent, production-quality global research network - one that is capable eventually of data rates of terabits per second which will be needed as part of major multinational scientific collaborations in areas such as high energy physics, radio and optical astronomy, weather forecasting and climatology, biological sciences and earth sciences. This network would also provide an invaluable testbed for the development of joint international research initiatives (such as GRIDs of various types) as well as for joint network research initiatives. The presentation will cover progress towards this goal.

Internet Standards, Advanced Networks and the Future
George Michaelson

Regional Governance needs you!
As the Internet extends further into society, the onus increases on participants to become involved in Internet governance. This presentation considers some of the processes and platforms for engagement available to the Internet community, and urges the very-large-network community to see their investment of staff and resources as part of the standard technology spend and vital for long-term strategic positioning. The presentation will discuss exchange-points, links to critical infrastructure, and the source of the future 'body-of-knowledge' people who will keep things working.

About GrangeNet: The Grid and Next Generation Network
John O'Callaghan

GrangeNet is a 3-year program that will install, operate and develop a multi-gigabit network to support grid and advanced communications services. The members of the GrangeNet consortium are AARNet, APAC, DSTC, Cisco and PowerTel. Participants in the GrangeNet program include AARNet members, APAC partners and a number of research and commercial organisations.

GrangeNet will be part of the global research and education network through access to the dual STM-1 capacity that AARNet has acquired on Southern Cross Cable Network (SCCN). Seven organisations responsible for advanced computing and communications programs in Asia and North America (including Internet2, Canarie and APAN) will be collaborating with GrangeNet.

The GrangeNet network will consist of a backbone linking Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane and initially 8 tails connecting over 20 organisations. The backbone will provide a dual 2.5 Gbps DWDM service from PowerTel using Cisco DWDM equipment. All tail sites will have Gigabit Ethernet connections to the backbone. GrangeNet will install five room-based video-conferencing facilities at APAC partner sites for group-group communications using IP multicast. The nodes will be part of an international Access Grid at over 70 sites around the world.

GrangeNet members will install and demonstrate advanced communications services, including IP multicast, Quality of Service (QoS), caching and mirroring, IPv6 and network management. They will also develop and deploy a range of grid services such as distributed computing, collaborative visualisation, cooperative environments, digital libraries and remote instrumentation. The GrangeNet Program is supported by the Commonwealth through the Building on IT Strengths (BITS) Advanced Networks Program (ANP) of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.

Technologies for the Information Economy
Terry Percival

As the electronic revolution turns into an information revolution, the CSIRO has established an initiative to develop and demonstrate the underlying technologies required for the Information Economy. One change in the new order will be the proliferation of virtual enterprises. These are groups of organizations who collaborate on specific projects by exchanging information or goods for either short or long periods. The individual organizations also belong to a number of different and potentially competing virtual enterprises. The information exchanged may vary from short messages of high value, information requiring quick feedback or large amounts of data where parts or the whole are extremely important.

CSIRO's Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CeNTIE) is working with end users from the medical, film post production, education and finance sectors to develop demonstration systems using an advanced network testbed. Experience gained from these demonstration systems is being used to develop the requisite networking technologies.


line Home | Program | Speakers | Abstracts | Contact us line