HEAnet Presentation to
Internet2 International Task Force
John Boland, HEAnet Chief Executive
Monday, October30th, 2000
Outline of Presentation
Irish NRN Background
 Current Climate
 HEAnet NGI Proposals
 Projects and Activities
 HEAnet’s Challenges

Irish Telecomms Climate
(and Bill Gates !)
Deregulation and Competition
 Aggressive E-commerce
legislation
 Bill Gates’ contribution
 Government underwrites Global
Crossing Transatlantic Cable
 360Networks direct US/Ireland
 Internet access costs slashed

Telecomms Climate continued
Spare Capacity to the US and 24
European cities
 Benefits starting to flow..
 UUnet Backbone extended to
Dublin
 MIT Media Lab
 Worldport , IBM, ASPs ….

HEAnet - Ireland’s NREN
1983 - TCD and UCD
 from X.25 to a private IP network
 1987 from Co-operative to Limited
Not-for-Profit Company
 Board of Directors
 Annual Budget
 Public Procurement Policy

Members of HEAnet
7 Universities
 Dublin Institute of Technology
 13 Institutes of Technology
 Tipperary Rural Business
Development Institute
 Government Research
Organisations
 MIT Media Labs ? Schools ? …..

The Services
Internet Services for the
community
 Direct Connections to the US,
Europe, UK and the WorldWide
Internet
 Hosted Databases- Web of
Science, Security seminars ...
 Now Mission Critical services...

HEAnet: Ten-155 Traffic
TeraBytes/Month
0.9
0.8
0.7
To Ten-155
0.6
From Ten-155
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
Aug-00
Jul-00
Jun-00
May-00
Apr-00
Mar-00
Feb-00
Jan-00
Dec-99
Nov-99
Oct-99
Sep-99
Aug-99
0
0
3
Aug-00
Jul-00
Jun-00
May-00
Apr-00
Mar-00
Feb-00
Jan-00
Dec-99
Nov-99
Oct-99
Sep-99
Aug-99
HEAnet: US Traffic
TeraBytes/Month
4
3.5
From US
2.5
2
1.5
To US
1
0.5
Next generation of Ireland’s
Internet
Background
 Government Policy
 Two-stranded approach
 Connecting to Internet2 and
Geant
 Identifying the Collaboration
opportunities


A Vital Rôle in developing the Irish
Information Society
Summary of Activities
Negotiating Global Crossing
STM-1 capacity to US and Europe
 Tenders underway for equipment
and backhauls
 Plan for major Upgrade of national
backbone

Projects seeking partners in
Internet2

Dublin City University
Multimedia Information Retrieval
Research Group
 content-based
navigation on digital
video information
 intelligent dispatcher for access to
Digital Libraries
 video collaboration with N. America
on taught courses
 collaboration with Santa Fe Institute
Projects continued..

Trinity College Dublin
Biochemistry
 Access
to marine algal species
information by CSIM
 image and distribute bio-diversity
information over Internet2
 Biomedical Computing
Collaborations with Washington,
Minnesota and Minneapolis
Universities
Pilots underway
US National Library of Medicine
and Trinity College Dublin
World Leading Telemedicine
 Supercomputer Project Trinity and
Queen’s University Belfast
 Irish Computational Grid
 Developing a Strategy for Video
Services
 TERENA Task Force on QoS/E2E

The Challenges

Putting the Bandwidth in place for
Q1 2001
 to
Internet2 networks, CA*net3,
Singaren ...
 to Geant

Stimulating the Applications
 US
and European inter-working
 Internet2 E&R collaborations

Funding advanced applications
Further Information :
 www.heanet.ie
 [email protected]
 [email protected]