Appendix B

Internet capacity in the university and research sectors in Australia

Prepared by George McLaughlin, Executive Director of AARNet, June 2002.

Background

Just as in the United States and the United Kingdom, the genesis of the Internet in Australia had its origins in the university sector. And again, as in the United States, the sell-off by the university sector of the commercial customer base of the Internet to the commercial sector in the mid 90s was quickly followed (within 18 months) by a need to reestablish an internet framework (Internet2 in the US, AARNet2 in Australia) due to the different emphasis of the commercial sector and the lack of suitability of what they could deliver to meet university and research sector needs.

Almost all developed countries and most developing countries have what is called a National Research and Education Network or NREN. AARNet is Australia's NREN (see the Advanced Research and Education Network Atlas (ARENA) http://arena.internet2.edu ).

In most countries the national government supports the NREN by contributing to the operational costs and contributing to the cost of international bandwidth (noting that the US and Canada don't pay for international capacity, but get a "free ride" on capacity paid for by other countries). In Australia, AARNet has been a "user-pays" network since its inception but has benefited from funding allocated under competitive programs that have allowed enhancements to AARNet and member infrastructure (eg AARNet's participation in the Research Data Networks CRC, and in the allocation of funds to GrangeNet, under the BITS Advanced Networks Program).

AARNet is a very large network by Australian standards. It has an end-user base approaching 800,000 most of whom use connections at speeds of 10 Mbps or greater, and massive data demands. Unlike most networks in Australia it is a net content provider, eg. in May 2002, AARNet and its members delivered 18.78 Terabytes (or almost 19million Megabytes) to the wider Australian Internet, but received only 12.85 Terabytes from other Australian sources. In spite of this statistic the major carriers in Australia have resisted peering with AARNet, ie. AARNet has to pay for the traffic it receives, but gains no revenue from what it delivers to other carriers.

AARNet is also a significant international player. In May 2002, AARNet served 27 Terabytes to the rest of the world and received 39 Terabytes in return. International issues will be the subject of a separate paper.

Responsibilities for the various levels of provision of capacity in the University and Research sector

AARNet

AARNet provides the backbone network to which the universities, CSIRO and certain other research bodies and collaborators connect. It also provides access to the national and international commodity Internet (ie Internet access to/from non-members) and to more than 40 other NRENs throughout North and South America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region.

AARNet currently has eight points of presence (PoPs) in Australia, one in each capital city.

The capacities from each PoP to the national and international commodity Internet (as at 6 June 2002) are:

1. In addition to the above AARNet has purchased 310 Mbps of trans-Pacific capacity principally to interconnect with the advanced networks of North America, but a portion of this is being used to trial commodity interconnections directly to North America.
2. 8 Mbps of additional off-net capacity has been acquired from Telstra, once this is fully tested the on-net capacity will be increased to 24 Mbps, and total capacity to 32 Mbps.
3. Plans have been developed to purchase an additional 6 Mbps of off-net capacity from Telstra and to increase the on-net capacity to 18 Mbps, giving a total capacity of 24 Mbps.
4. This capacity is used to provide content to the wider Australian Internet - AARNet receives no revenue from this service (the capacity is provided by Optus).

Regional Network Organisations (RNO)

RNOs are unincorporated joint ventures of universities in a particular State or Territory that manage the PoP in that State or Territory and arrange for data transfer between the PoP and main campus of individual members.

AARNet will take on this role in NSW shortly, and then in Western Australia, South Australia and the ACT.

Connections between the PoP and the main metropolitan campus of individual members in that State or Territory are generally made using ATM-based microwave links ranging from 34 Mbps (most common) to 155 Mbps. The ATM microwave infrastructure was put in place in 1997 funded in part from a $3.4 million allocation as part of the Research Data Networks CRC. Members more than matched the dollar value to deploy this infrastructure. The infrastructure has served the sector well and has demonstrated how government funds can be effectively used, but it is now coming to the end of its useful and economic life. As but one example the 34 Mbps link from UNSW to the Sydney PoP runs at full capacity most days and for a number of members there is insufficient capacity to deploy new services such as multicast.

Regional universities whose main campus is some considerable distance from a PoP currently lease capacity from incumbent carriers. These costs are extremely high (and the bandwidth deployed consequently less). Significant effort is going in to exploring alternative options for providing cost-effective capacity where possible.

Viable replacement infrastructure is now required. The associated costs are not insignificant.

Canberra

AARNet is acting as agent for the ACT member institutions (and some of the cultural organisations) to deploy fibre between the various locations of these institutions and the AARNet PoP at ANU. Canberra is relatively unique in Australia in having a cooperative arrangement between the ICON network and other carriers that allows such infrastructure to be deployed cost effectively. ACT members have funded the new fibre build and are deploying Gigabit Ethernet connections to the PoP.

Sydney Basin

AARNet is acting as agent for the five Sydney Basin universities to deploy a metropolitan fibre ring connecting these members to the Sydney PoP. Dark fibre will be leased for a period of 10 years and will be "lit" by AARNet acting as agent for the members. The Sydney Basin initiative is funded in large part from a grant from DEST. The Sydney Basin initiative is working with the CeNTIE project (funded by the ANP) to expand the scope and avoid duplication in the Sydney area.

Perth and South Australia

Initiatives are in hand to a greater or lesser extent to put in place some degree of fibre build to connect members to the respective PoPs. Funds were made available from the Interactive Virtual Environment Centre initiative (WA) and from DEST's Systemic Infrastructure Fund (SA)

Victoria

The Victorian universities have put considerable effort into developing a comprehensive fibre deployment strategy, but have so far been unsuccessful in their various bids for funds to facilitate the build.

Queensland

The Queensland universities, through QuestNet, are developing a comprehensive plan for fibre deployment (metropolitan) and improved capacity (regional).

Regional

The regional universities currently receive a grant from DEST to fund adequate capacity. This grant expires at the end of 2002. The universities concerned have put forward proposals to various funding initiatives (SII, NCF).

AARNet is currently in discussion with various utilities and rail authorities that have available fibre to explore the feasibility of using such infrastructure to provide more cost effective access to these institutions.

Individual Universities

Individual universities are responsible for connections between their campuses. Many metropolitan universities have campuses in regional locations and suffer many of the same cost issues as regional universities.

Drivers of capacity demand

AARNet member traffic continues to increase at ~50%pa as illustrated in the table below:

Ie. even though there have been significant unit-cost reductions the total cost is increasing significantly and will, in total, amount to more than $30million in 2002.

Leaving aside the high-demand e-science programs that will not be possible without initiatives like GrangeNet and CeNTIE, improved infrastructure is required to fully benefit from the collaborative tools that can be readily deployed over a well-performing infrastructure.

This can be as simple as running videoconferencing-over-IP. This is no longer rocket science, but does require a minimum bandwidth IN BOTH DIRECTIONS of at least 512 kbps to be useful. So-called asymmetric broadband services, such as ADSL and satellite (even 2-way satellite) are not suited to this. The table below illustrates the power, flexibility and cost-effectiveness of video over the internet relative to traditional videoconferencing:

Going up a level we have Access Grids. These are special rooms with walls capable of displaying multiple multimedia projections. The transport protocol is IP multicast. An example of this is Australia's participation in the SCGlobal digital conference in October of 2001.

The host site was in Denver Colorado, but 50 constellation sites throughout the world participated remotely including VisLab at the Technology Park in Sydney. At VisLab, 12 simultaneous feeds were displayed from the smorgasbord of the 50 participating global sites. The images of the presenter and his/her presentation were enlarged, the remaining sites representing a selection of the global audience. At the end of the presentation the moderator takes questions from the global audience. A minimum of 2 Mbps per feed is required for adequate display. It is anticipated that there will be over a dozen access grids deployed in Australia by the end of 2002 and this number will likely increase to over 30 during 2003.

All of these applications can be usefully deployed in the research, teaching and learning and health sectors (remote diagnosis) and have general applicability to the wider community.

Even a basic web-cam is a useful device for remote monitoring (people/equipment) but does need minimum bandwidth requirements and reasonable download limits. Jeffrey Tobias (CEO, Smart Internet CRC) has already made reference to other Internet-enabled devices.

In summary, although large content sources which deliver significant amounts of data to a large number of people will continue to be important (where asymmetric bandwidth is not an issue) there is an increasing number of collaborative applications that will need symmetric bandwidth.

As mentioned above, a separate paper will be prepared on the national and international infrastructure required to support e-science and an overview of initiatives elsewhere in the world. This will include references to GrangeNet, upgrades to AARNet's trans-Pacific capacity, potential acquisitions of capacity from Australia to Japan and to Singapore.