It's no yarn! Optic Fibre for Swinburne campuses

Article by Richard Constantine
Chief Information Officer & Director

Back in 2004 Swinburne University, along with all other Victorian Universities and CSIRO, set up a company to provide high speed connectivity to all Universities and CSIRO. That company was VERNET.

Prahran and Hawthorn campuses were initially the only Swinburne campuses that were going to receive optic fibre connectivity due to the ease of connectivity and relative low cost but in an effort to ensure we had equal access at all our campuses, ITS applied for a $2 million Commonwealth development pool grant, which was to connect Lilydale, Wantirna and Croydon to the VERNET network. This grant was successful and was scheduled for 2007.

Contracts have now been finalised and work has already commenced to run optic fibre some 50 kms to our eastern campuses.

The project is scheduled for completion by March 2008, with connectivity up and working by mid-2008.

By mid-2008, we expect to have all our five campuses linked via optic fibre providing a tremendous benefit to our University well into the future.

The obvious benefits will include:

• faster access to Swinburne servers and the internet
• improved performance of applications such as Finance1 and Blackboard
• high speed access to the Victorian Educational and Research network (VERN) and other Australian Universities.

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