Funds to provide speed boost for NEPTUNE data
When data start flowing from the NEPTUNE Canada undersea cabled observatory, possibly as early as fall 2008, it will reach researchers faster and in greater volume thanks to a dedicated high bandwidth Internet connection.
CANARIE, a not-for-profit corporation that designs and delivers Canada’s research and education backbone advanced network, is providing the $2.2 million to fund the line for 10 years through its Infrastructure Extension Program. CANARIE is funded primarily by the federal government through Industry Canada and is supported by its members in the public and private sectors and academia.
The dedicated line, provided by Shaw Business Solutions, is capable of carrying up to 10 billion bits per second, the equivalent of 500 simultaneous broadcast-quality HDTV channels. The fibre-optic line will run between the University of Victoria’s shore station in Port Alberni and the UVic campus—a distance of 200 kilometres.
“This funding ensures a critical high-speed link between the cable system on the floor of the northeast Pacific Ocean and the NEPTUNE Canada headquarters at UVic,” says Benoit Pirenne, NEPTUNE Canada’s associate director of information technology. “The high bandwidth ensures instant delivery of data from hundreds of sensors, and allows us to control all aspects of the observatory’s operations in real time, including cameras and remotely operated vehicles.”
The line will provide the NEPTUNE Canada network with the required capacity to support the hundreds of instruments and sensors it will install later this year on the seafloor on an 800-km underwater cable loop west of Vancouver Island. The transmitted data will flow out from UVic through existing high bandwidth research network connections to scientists and the public around the world.
The UVic-led NEPTUNE Canada project is the world’s first regional cabled ocean observatory. Its development and installation and its novel technologies are funded by significant grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the BC Knowledge Development Fund.
