Paul Brislen: Science leaps ahead, NZ chugs behind

Imagine for a moment you're a researcher at a university in New Zealand. You might be studying the works of Chaucer or high energy physics or something to do with the human genome or biotechnology.

Today you're working in a vacuum. You can't download the latest version of the genome because it would take all day, tying up both the computer resources and network capacity - not to mention your entire budget in bandwidth costs. Instead you will have to wait for several months for a stack of CDs to be sent out or perhaps you will just abandon that area of research.

Today's scientists are able to make tremendous leaps of understanding, far more than their predecessors, for one simple reason: they can share knowledge on a level undreamed of in years gone by. Cheap processing power and international telecommunications traffic capacity have come together to provide scientists with the tools they need to unlock the secrets of the universe.

New Zealand scientists, unfortunately, need not apply.

This country does not have an advanced network that will allow scientific communities to share these tremendous data at the price researchers can afford. The pipes are there, but the telcos charge for each megabyte sent or received.

I made contact this week with Ian Foster, a Kiwi and professor of computer science in Chicago. He's one of the world's foremost experts on grid computing, sharing resources among thousands of PC users.

Foster was coming out to New Zealand earlier this year for a conference. He sent a 1MB (megabyte) file to Wellington and it took four hours to get there. From his office he can send half a terabyte (500 gigabytes) to Switzerland in less than half an hour.

Foster worked out how long it would take to send half a terabyte to Wellington at New Zealand's rates - 500 years. That's right, that's how far behind our scientists are if they try to interact with overseas counterparts.

To put it in perspective, the average video store holds around 8TB of movies. The US Library of Congress is said to hold 20TB of text. Sending half a terabyte of traffic to a New Zealand account needs a connection that is fast and cheap, and telcos typically aren't keen.

Enter the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology's Advanced Network project. All the country's universities and some of the crown research institutes are getting together with the government to build an advanced network in New Zealand.

A series of 15 points of presence will be established around the country, connected potentially by a dark fibre network.

These points of presence are basically a rack of servers and switches stored in a cupboard somewhere handy to the network. In Auckland that's traditionally been the Sky Tower, where various bits of network gear sit humming quietly to themselves. It's quite an underwhelming sight - just rack-mounted boxes with little lights on the front. Fascinating.

The key to building such a network is fibre optic cable. Contrary to popular belief, New Zealand has quite a lot of fibre already in the ground. There are choke points, the Cook Strait for example, but generally there's a lot of it about and not all of it is owned by the telcos.

Fibre is great stuff. It has a relatively long lifespan and you don't have to dig it up to increase its carrying capacity. Clever use of the electronics at either end of the cable splits the beam of light into small wavelengths, giving you more capacity from the same lines.

Dense wave division multiplexing is the name of the game and it means cables like the Southern Cross Cable, connecting New Zealand with Australia, Fiji and the US, can double its capacity every few years. That's right, double.

The problem is the network team want dark fibre - untouched by telcos' billing systems. Dark fibre is, as the name suggests, just the fibre. No conditioning, no management, just the fibre.

Telcos don't like giving away their fibre like that, though. It undermines their business model. Telecom is spending a billion dollars building a new network with all the smarts it can pack in, which is exactly the opposite of this dark fibre network. It's a smart network that allows Telecom to manage all the connections so as to optimise them for different tasks. Voice requires a different kind of network to video conferencing or online gaming or TV, for example. Telecom will also, not coincidentally, be able to charge accordingly. A dark fibre network costs money to install and maintain but doesn't include those additional charges. Therein lies the problem.

However, this is being led by a government with an agenda, a university group with a mission and a science user base with a passion, so it could well come to pass.

They have a budget rumoured to be pushing hundreds of millions, and a mandate and an employee, in the form of Charles Jarvie, who set up the Southern Cross Cable in the first place.

With all those things, and public willingness, the advanced network should get the kick start we need. Without it, we should all learn how to say, "Would you like fries with that?"