By Stuart Corner
Monday, 08 February 2010 13:10 iTWire.com
Southern Cross Cable Networks has extended until 2020 its sponsorship of the Southern Cross Trans-Pacific Optical Research Test bed (SXTransPORT) - capacity on its cable network that provides 10Gbps links to the US for the Australian research community.
Under the sponsorship agreement between Southern Cross and AARNet, the SXTransPORT services will continue to provide dual 10Gbps capacity circuits to connect AARNet to national research and education networks in North America for scientific, research and education traffic through until 2020.
SXTransPORT was initiated in December 2003. The cost of the capacity for the initial three years was put at $44.8 million. What today's announcement did not acknowledge was the considerable contribution provided by the Australian Government to get the facility put in place.
The Federal Department of Education, Science and Training contributed $16.4 million under its Systemic Infrastructure Initiative, part of the $3 billion, Backing Australia's Ability programme. A spokesman for AARNet told iTWire today that the Federal Government was no longer providing any funding for the service.
No figure has been put on the value of the sponsorship extension. However, it will be much less per year than that quoted in 2003 because the price for international capacity on Southern Cross has come down considerably as more competing alternatives have been build, most recently Pipe's PPC-1.
With the launch of PPC-1 imminent last August, Southern Cross Cable announced another price cut. Sales director Ross Pfeffer, said; "The new Southern Cross price for 5Gbps of restored capacity represents around $US0.28 per Gigabyte downloaded from the US. This has reduced by 86 percent, from $US1.95 per Gigabyte, in December 2003."
According to Mary Fleming, business development director of AARNet, "The SXTransPORT has provided Australian researchers and scientists an unprecedented opportunity to collaborate in areas such as astronomy and science that have been of great significance to Australia and the international community.
"Some of these collaborative efforts simply would not have been possible without the SXTransPORT and the assistance of Southern Cross Cable Networks and we are so pleased to be able to assure its continuation for the next decade."
Professor Geoffrey Taylor of the School of Physics at The University of Melbourne and leader of the Australian effort at CERN's Large Hadron Collider said, "The University of Melbourne is actively involved in the Large Hadron Collider program and the 10Gbps access point that connects us to AARNet and the SXTransPORT facilitates our collaboration with scientists and researchers in the United States, Asia and Europe allowing very large amounts of data to be transferred for analysis quickly."
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