Budget awards CANARIE $110 million for new high-speed research network

CA*net 4 concept approved

CANARIE Inc has received long-awaited funding to develop a radically new optical high-speed research network with the awarding of $110 million to build and operate CA*net 4. The year-end money was included in last week’s Budget and sets the stage to deploy new routing technology that underpins a grid network architecture allowing researchers to reserve dedicated wavelengths of point-to-point, multi-gigabit-per-second capacity. The news comes simultaneously with the deferral of the politically charged national broadband initiative, championed by Industry minister Brian Tobin.

CA*net 4 will replace CA*net 3, the world’s first all-optical broadband research network which has garnered considerable international attention and placed Canada at the forefront of the field. It’s hoped that CA*net 4 will allow Canada to maintain that lead and provide a key enabling tool in Ottawa’s objective of moving from 15th to 5th in global R&D spending by 2010.

“CA*net 4 is not just a very big and very fast pipe between researchers and institutions. It’s also specific, end-to-end light patches to specific resources at the edge of the network bringing together research teams,” says CANARIE president & CEO Dr Andrew Bjerring. “The grid architecture represents the dominant thinking about where to go (with high-speed research infrastructure) and we hope to be first.”

The concept for CA*net 4 was hatched by CANARIE last year in part to maintain Canada’s lead. But it also addresses future requirements in education and the private sector and includes a broad range of activities such as advanced caching and support for provincial and municipal networks. Perhaps more significantly, the network was conceived to extend beyond North America with links to Asia and Europe, positioning Canada as a desirable centre for routing Internet research traffic.

CANARIE executives will learn more about which portions of the CA*net 4 proposal have been accepted when they enter negotiations with Industry Canada officials. Bjerring says specific ideas on how to proceed with design and deployment will also emerge in discussions with industry carriers.

Earlier this year CANARIE issued a request for information (RFI) to solicit potential partners for the project. The RFI attracted four companies that wish to participate and discussions will continue in the weeks ahead. If an acceptable agreement with most or all of the firms can be reached, Bjerring says a formal request for proposals may not be necessary. The main concern is timing. The contract with Bell Nexia for managing of CA*net 3 expires soon.

“The timing is pretty good. We need about six months between confirming with the carriers to getting up and running,” he says. “The CA*net 3 contract runs out July 31st so we have to design the network and be up and running by the fall of 2002.”

Bjerring’s enthusiasm over the success of CA*net 4 is tempered by the lengthy deferral of a major initiative to extend broadband coverage across Canada, including rural and remote communities — a central recommendation of the National Broadband Task Force of which he was a member.

In the Budget, Finance minister Paul Martin threw cold water on the proposal (backed by potential Liberal leadership rival Brian Tobin) by calling for further planning and suggesting that two existing programs — SchoolNet and the Community Access Program(CAP) — may be modified “to ensure broadband access”. The budgets for the two programs were extended at existing levels for another two years, with $105 million over three years “for three years thereafter to support such broadband expansion”.

“It’s hard to be critical given the other pressures in the Budget, but government has essentially decided to put broadband largely to the side for the time being. It’s understandable but a disappointment,” says Bjerring. “There may be some way in which SchoolNet and CAP could be seen as steps toward the development of a broadband initiative, so over the next three years we may see changes in their mandates.”

The Task Force estimated that it would cost about $1.5 billion to remove the impedi- ment of distance in extending broadband coverage. The sum encompasses funding from all sources and not just that of the federal government.

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