A 10 Gbps fibre-optic connection between Perth and Sydney designed to foster research and development was officially launched today, halfway through a three year program intended to connect as great a number of Australian research centres as possible.

The Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CeNTIE) was officially launched this morning by the Minister for Telecommunications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Richard Alston. The launch occured simultaneously in Sydney and Perth, with applications demonstrated over the network between the two cities.

CeNTIE is dedicated to answering the question of what Australian researchers could do if bandwidth was free and infinite, by letting users do new things not possible at the moment due to economic or technology impediments.

CeNTIE used AU$14 million funding from the Advanced Networks Program to lease fibre cable when it was economically viable and laid new fibre when necessary. At the launch mention was made of the "unhelpfulness" of some carriers.

"There's a large telecommunications duct across the Lane Cove River, and the cost of getting access for 10 years was twice the cost of [boring our own duct]," said Dr Terry Percival, director of CeNTIE at the launch.

Alston, who said the network "puts Australia firmly on the map", said he had expected research institutions to cooperate to further the national interest. "I was concerned about the lack of cooperation between commercial entities, but I guess that's the nature of the turf wars that go on," he said.

CeNTIE will link up with GrangeNet to extend the network, which will include centres in Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide. The network is designed to provide researchers with high bandwidth, low latency connections with a quality of service matched to the applications.

Some of the applications currently used over the CeNTIE network are hapto-visual acoustic technologies, which add the sense of touch to the senses of sight and sound that are currently available over a network.

Australia's movie industry, described by Alston as "the best post-production in the world", will benefit by reducing the time required to edit films. The director and technicians can interact in real time over the network, instead of using the linear batch workflow model used now, where final products are shipped between locations. The large data sets involved with this sort of interactive editing have high bandwidth costs.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is information brokering. Rather than single, high bandwidth applications information brokering involves small amounts of bandwidth, but millions of them. Examples include transactions between banks, or paying GST to the Australian Tax Office.

Gary Doherty, general manager for government relations and ICT business for CeNTIE, told ZDNet Australia   part of the research was going into reducing latency across the network, and the centre had already reduced latency to below commercial levels. He said CeNTIE was working with a lot of focus groups to ensure research was occurring in areas that would bring benefit to the industry.

"The network allows people to do things without spending millions of dollars on TV studios," said Doherty, as an example. He said there is a cost involved in rolling out the network, so the productivity gains need to be demonstrated to business. "There are improvements in productivity, you don't need a million dollar super computer, you can do it on a standard PC."

Doherty said CeNTIE would do research to create applications, do trials to prove the value of the idea, then hand it over to its commercial partners and take a percentage of the profits.

The founding members of CeNTIE are the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the University of NSW, the University of Technology, Sydney, Nortel Networks, IP1 Australia and the Western Australian Interactive Virtual Environments Centre.

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