Cyber link's high-speed driver

Scotsman Donald Clark's first job in New Zealand was at the Crown Company Monitoring Advisory Unit (CCMAU) where his duties included overseeing a fledgling project to build a super-fast national telecommunications network for researchers.

Four years on, Clark is now a month into a new role as inaugural chief executive of that same project: the Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand (Reannz).

"I think I would have been a bit kinder and less stringent [at CCMAU] if I'd known I was going to end up running it," he jokes.

Reannz is set to go live this year with a high-speed link of up to 10Gbps (4000 times faster than a top-end 2.5Mbps DSL connection) between most of the country's major research centres and tertiary institutions.

The Government has spent $43 million directly on the project, with about the same again from taxpayers through user institutions' contributions.

The rationale behind Reannz is that the ability to transfer huge amounts of data to and between institutions without worrying about per-gigabyte costs will unleash significant research and learning potential.

"Part of the mission is to make this thing an essential utility for research and education - just that it's there, that it's transparent and useful to the end user," says Clark.

So far eight of the country's nine Crown Research Institutes, the National Library and all eight universities have signed up for the service. Clark says part of his role is getting other institutions enthusiastic about the network's potential and signed on - something he thinks should not be difficult.

"We're in a position now where we're a few months away from having the network finally provisioned and people connected, but already the question is not, 'Are people going to connect and what are they going to pay?'. The question is: 'How can we make the researchers and the educators get the most benefit out of this?'."

Being at the helm of the project as it becomes a working reality is a dream job for Clark.

"This role for me - which is a combination of telcos, internet and science - is just wonderful. It's a confluence of some of the things I find most exciting in life."

He has a background in business consulting and worked for Booz Allen Hamilton and PricewaterhouseCoopers before arriving in New Zealand, where his wife has family connections.

He also briefly headed up the business development side of Ask Jeeves in Europe during the heady days at the turn of the century just before the dot-com bubble burst.

That role was "a lot of fun" but lasted just a year "which was the entire life-span of Ask Jeeves for Business in the UK", he says.

In New Zealand, Clark followed his CCMAU role with a position in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet as policy adviser on telecommunications, transport, economic development, state-owned enterprises, science, innovation and broadcasting.

He says advanced networks are now a requirement if New Zealand is to be taken seriously in the international research community.

Abut 40 countries have similar networks, which are an "entry ticket into international collaboration".

"This is not some space-age zany requirement. This is a must-have to talk. A lot of science is getting bigger and no one institution or country can necessarily do it on its own."

Clark says the project will also act to drive competition to build broadband infrastructure and raise the expectation levels of students, the next generation of network users.

"They're going to get an increased expectation and fluency with high-speed network access. There's not going to be an acceptance of crap network speed. These guys are going to come through and just perceive a speed of 100Mbps to the desktop as the norm. That demand and that expectation will drive a mindset change."

Donald Clark

Who: Inaugural chief executive, the Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand (Reannz).

Favourite gadget: iPod Nano.

Next big thing: Identity protection: "de-googling" yourself. "I think there's going to be a huge backlash against social networking at some point. People are going to realise they've got too much of themselves out there."

Alternative career: Outward Bound Instructor.

Spare time: "Playing with and cleaning-up after my 8-month-old and 2-year-old kids."

Favourite sci-fi movie: Gattaca.