Slashdot Mirror
Australian Research Network Plans For 100Gbps
angry tapir writes "The Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet) has announced a wide range of initiatives around network upgrades, collaboration, and mobility as part of a new five-year plan. The plan includes delivering a 100Gbps backbone to its education and research customers, to ensure sufficient 'headroom' for major projects such as the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope."
The 'international bottleneck' is a bit of a myth. The capacity we have now, on SXC, PPC1, AJC and others, isn't fully utilised. In fact, some of those cables aren't even being close to fully ~lit~. Plus, our total international capacity is due to almost double in the near future as the Pacific Fibre cable project is completed (estimated to be in 2013). ~The particular ISP you are using~ may be too stingy to spend the money on buying enough international capacity (and hence you may experience slower connections to overseas hosts than you would like). But that doesn't mean there's a bottleneck for the country as a whole.
Either way this has little to do with AARNet, which isn't a residential ISP and which buys more than sufficient international capacity. I certainly didn't notice any international bottleneck when I lived on campus (i.e. connected to AARNet). Well-connected overseas sites were just as fast as well-connected domestic ones and often came close to maxing out the 100 Mbit interface speed. Good on em for continuing to plan for the future (though I don't think this is particularly newsworthy - every decent network is planning the same way).