Space centre’s fast internet could help town

ALEXANDRA might be able to ‘‘piggyback’’ on extra bandwidth which could be installed in the district for the Centre for Space Science Technology (CSST), chief executive Steve Cotter says.

Mr Cotter said problems with bandwidth (the speed of internet) on the Central Otago network were a significant issue for CSST, as they meant some staff sometimes needed to be sent to Wellington to work because they could not do CSST work in Alexandra.

The challenges of getting affordable, highperformance bandwidth were acknowledged in the CSST’s business plan, but no solution had been proposed or funding allocated, Mr Cotter said.

The CSST board had asked him to solve the problem, and some of CSST’s $14.7 million Government funding would go towards a solution.

He said he was now talking to commercial providers about installing sufficient bandwidth for CSST, and noted Alexandra residents and businesses could benefit significantly from the move by extra bandwidth being made available to them.

‘‘If we can bring this bandwidth to Alexandra they [the CSST board] very much see that as part of their role of helping the local economy.’’

The work of CSST as an Earth observation data repository, enabling access to new and existing satellite measurements, meant CSST staff were working with ‘‘extremely large flows of data from very far away’’, Mr Cotter said.

A normal photo someone might send on their computer could be 2Mb. CSST would have files up to 10,000 times larger, anywhere from ‘‘100Gb to a couple of terabytes’’, he said.

‘‘With the current connection we have 27Mb/s down [download speed] 2Mb/s up [upload speed]. If we were going to share a 1Tb file with a customer it would take 43 days to transfer that file,’’ Mr Cotter said.

Mr Cotter said CSST would like a 1Gb/s dedicated connection to start with.

But it was possible it might seek or get more than that, and extra bandwidth could then be made available to Alexandra residents and businesses.

He said the details of any arrangement with the Alexandra community were not yet known, but ‘‘I’ll work something out. It could very much be that they [Alexandra] piggyback on what we do.’’

A possible solution for CSST would be for it to lay its own fibre from Alexandra to Cromwell, and then connect with the national Reannz educational network, which already went through Cromwell, Mr Cotter said.

‘‘That will then connect us to on a high speed highway to all of the universities, all the CRIs and, just as importantly, to all the international universities and researchers.’’

Mr Cotter said he hoped to make a request for pricing (RFP) to commercial providers soon and have the bandwidth issue resolved within 612 months.

In the meantime he was talking to the Alexandra business community about how their businesses could be transformed with greater bandwidth and by using things such as cloudbased applications.

A Mr Cotter is former chief executive of Geant, the Netherlandsbased, panEuropean Research and Education Network and before that was chief executive at Reannz, the advanced network serving universities and Crown Research Institutes, based in Wellington.