The Island: Heron Island Research Station WAN upgrade project

Situated on the southern Great Barrier Reef, 80 kilometres offshore from the city of Gladstone, HIRS is the oldest and largest marine research station on the Reef. The research station is home to up to 150 staff and students, who not only rely on their network connection for internal business applications (finance, payroll, risk assessment, etc), but also for external applications for both operational needs and personal (Coles online food ordering, technical resources, news, etc).
The island is connected to the internet via a low bandwidth high latency satellite link, running a separate traffic accounting and authorization platform on the island and connecting to UQ terminal servers for access to those internal applications. In an effort to make the best of what is available, and improve on the overall user experience of the island staff and visitors, UQ IT staff have deployed a dedicated WAN solution including acceleration hardware, and firewalling services, in an attempt to overcome some of the usability hurdles previously experienced.
In this presentation, I will discuss some of the issues experienced by the users, the new implementation (WAN acceleration, content filtering, firewalls/security and routing), the issues we encountered, the results, the user experience, and a look into the future of communications for the research station.