Liberal election win will likely pave way for $150-million Internet network

The signs are positive that the federal Liberals, if re-elected, will allocate up to $150 million in the February budget for a new national Internet network that will extend to Europe and parts of Asia. The encouraging words from Industry Canada and even the Prime Minister’s Office come as engineers at Canarie Inc are developing contingency plans to deal with a capacity crunch within the next year. New data released this month by Canarie show that the average traffic on CA*net 3 has exploded from 30 Mbs to 120 Mbs over the last 10 months. Peak traffic volume is estimated to be around 300 to 500 Mbs, without accounting for anticipated growth when school boards begin interconnecting their own fibre networks. "There’s a lot more video going across the network, videoconferencing and video servers, trying to crank out the data," Bill St. Arnaud, Canarie’s senior director of advanced networks told Network Letter. "Based on current growth rates, at this time next year we should be hitting congestion." "What this means," he adds, "is that we will have to initially start employing some quality of service techniques to give people priority. We will also light up additional wavelengths." But these are only stop-gap measures. Canarie’s preferred solution, which it has been pitching to the federal government for over a year, is the migration to a new optical research network (NL, July 17/00). "We are planning for CA*net 4 and hopefully, an election and government forces willing, we will get funding for a successor to CA*net 3," he states. "The contract for CA*net 3 expires in 2002 and so we have to start planning now." Canarie hopes to launch the new network by next fall, to ensure a smooth transition from CA*net 3. Convincing a Liberal government to fund CA*net 4 shouldn’t be difficult. The government is flush with surplus money, has repeatedly affirmed its support for facilities that promote research and development, and just recently, committed to bring broadband to every Canadian community, as the next phase of its ‘Connectedness" strategy (NL, Oct. 23/00). If the Liberals are re-elected, St. Arnaud expects the funding for CA*net 4 would be included in the February federal budget. "It is looking positive. I know right from the Prime Minister’s office that we’ve been given strong, strong support and signals." The price tag for CA*net 4 is nearly three times higher than CA*net 3, which received $55 million from the federal government in 1998 (NL, Mar. 2/98). St. Arnaud says this new network would be more expensive because it includes wavelengths to Europe and the Asia Pacific region. Between $10-$20 million of the proposed $150-million budget would be used to buy 20-year indefeasible rights-of-use (IRUs) for about four strands of fibre across the country. The wavelengths across the Atlantic, he adds, would cost $20 million or less, and the links across the Pacific are expected to cost about $50 million. St. Arnaud attributes the increased use on the network to new applications being developed and deployed, such as the University of Toronto’s tele-mammography project and a high-energy physics project at the University of Saskatoon. "The ‘build it, they will come’ strategy has worked," he says. "(CA*net 3) was slow to get started, but now the new applications are coming on stream, and we’re seeing dramatic jumps in traffic and we know there’s a whole backlog of things to come." Much of the demand is being driven by Canadian universities, particularly McGill, Dalhousie, Toronto and the British Columbia Institute of Technology. At the U of T one mammogram transmission is 33 Mbs, and St. Arnaud says this will likely increase to 100 Mbs. "And they intend to send thousands of these," he says. "So we see this huge avalanche coming at us." Another application that is pushing bandwidth usage to new levels is student radio stations. "They are transmitting on compressed high quality audio, much higher than MP3. And each one of those streams for example is 1.4 megabits. So it’s all surround stereo and all this type of stuff. Those types of things are really starting to come onstream and starting to drive up the demand."

Liberal election win will likely pave way for $150-million Internet network

News | 11/20/2000 5:00 am EST

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