Schools connect to Internet backbone

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 14 February 2007 07:17

Your IT - Home IT

Schools in the ACT, Northern Territory and New South Wales are the first to connect to the national third-generation broadband network.

Operated by AARNet, a company owned by 37 Australian Universities and the CSIRO, AARNet3 has "virtually unrestricted capacity," according to CEO Chris Hancock, which "allows schools, universities and research organisations to exchange information more freely, which means they can collaborate and interact in a virtual environment, making delivery of courses much more flexible."

"Any school that is already connected to an aggregational wide-area network such as the state-based education department networks can access the national backbone," he added.

This extra bandwidth makes video-related applications more viable, whether that's videoconferencing to support students in remote areas of the Northern Territory, or providing metropolitan students with access to resources such as australianscreen online, which draws upon the National Film and Sound Archive as well as other TV, radio and film archives.

"AARNet3 allows at least a five-fold increase in capacity and is definitely more cost effective [than the previous ISP]," said Greg Moo, CIO of Northern Territory Schools.