ACADEMIA

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- Sydney's reputation as a 'Global City' comes a step closer with the signing of an agreement to build the next major segment of Australia's 'super' network. The agreement between Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CeNTIE) and Australian-owned telecommunications carrier, FLOWCOM Limited (ASX FLO) has just been signed. "Imagine the city of the future, the wired city where quality education, medical and business services are at your fingertips, independent of your location," says Dr. Terry Percival, Director of CeNTIE. "The network that will stimulate the evolution of the Global City is being designed right now by CeNTIE, and FLOWCOM will provide part of its Sydney based network infrastructure," says Dr. Percival. Under the agreement FLOWCOM will provide a major new link from the University of Technology, through Sydney's CBD, to Artarmon in Sydney's North. "I am pleased with the FLOWCOM offering as it provides the network with path diversity for improved reliability through the city and across the harbour, at realistic pricing. Construction on parts of the network not provided by FLOWCOM will begin shortly," Dr. Percival says. "We are excited to be participating in the CeNTIE project," says Tom Amos, Chief Executive of FLOWCOM. "As a next generation carrier we have the advantage of a flexible, future proof infrastructure which allows us to work with the cutting edge customer such as CeNTIE. We hope to achieve early adoption of the exciting technology being proven by CeNTIE". CeNTIE is linking research, education and health organizations and other advanced users in Sydney's Global City corridor stretching from Sydney's "Silicon Gully" around North Ryde to the airport via St Leonards, North Sydney, and the CBD. The next stage of the CeNTIE network will extend out to Marsfield in the North-West and the University of NSW in the South-East. "This will enable trials of advanced tele-health and new work flow practices for the film post-production industry," says Dr. Percival. CeNTIE's advanced high speed network will provide the extreme capacity and performance necessary for these pilots. "Using 10 Gigabit per second Ethernet and wavelength division multiplexing technologies, CeNTIE's network has already proven it can carry an enormous amount of data between locations," Dr. Percival says. "This was demonstrated recently when two people, miles apart, were able to work together on a virtual 3D object, each being able to feel the object and see what the other person was doing to it. At the same time they could use a studio quality video and audio link to communicate." Both the film post-production and health community have challenging networking problems requiring high bandwidth communications and stringent Quality of Service (QoS). "Tapping into CeNTIE's advanced network will enable users such as the film community to undertake on-line collaboration and editing of huge data sets in real time, something that has not been feasible before," said Dr. Dean Economou, CeNTIE's Chief Technologist. The health community also is being thrust headlong into the future. With the aim of vastly improved service delivery unencumbered by the location of either the service provider or the service user, CeNTIE is trialing tele-health applications on its network including virtual reality surgical training, tele-ultrasound, tele-radiology and tele-mentoring, Another exciting project to be trialled is a virtual intensive care unit, a concept being developed with Dr. Patrick Cregan, Director of Surgery at Nepean Hospital, as part of his Virtual Hospitalis project. "This project will use the high bandwidth network to provide advanced users a quantum lead in tele-presence technology for collaboration and distance education," Dr. Cregan says. The project will include optical wavelength division multiplexing and Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Metropolitan Area Network technology, building on CeNTIE and Nortel's successful trials of 10G Ethernet in Canberra, the first in the Asia Pacific Region. CeNTIE is partly funded by the DCITA Building on IT Strengths (BITS) Advanced Network Program.