Abstract

This presentation will discuss UQSchoolsNet, a new initiative for Schools, developed by UQconnect, the University of Queensland’s ISP.  UQ SchoolsNet is founded on the principle of establishing an on-line community consisting of schools who are able to connect to each other at high speed, and the University of Queensland, as a major educational content provider and ISP. It is believed that this will lead to increasing levels of collaboration which will in turn reduce costs, enable the provision of innovative new services and allow enhanced access to educational content. It is considered an essential pre-requisite for the effective use of many social networking applications and is fully consistent with the Government’s digital initiatives for schools. Through UQconnect, the university’s ‘not for profit’ education ISP, UQ is in a position to help schools through the provision of a range of IT services and will be developing a “smorgasbord” of such services.

Each School’s network is connected to UQSchoolsNet through a gigabit Ethernet connection on dark fibre, direct to the University of Queensland’s network.  This service, called the Access service, is provided without charge to the pilot schools in SchoolsNet. Building on this high speed access, the collaboration service connects together all schools within SchoolsNet, the University of Queensland and a range of content rich web sites with which SchoolsNet has a peering connection.  These are all high speed connections which currently include access to the ABC web site.

The collaboration service is the only one that schools must take because it enables a school to fully participate in the community and without this level of participation, there would be little point in joining SchoolsNet. An optional internet service has designed as a very high speed service for schools, which builds on the access and collaboration services to provide internet access with university level speeds at modest cost. This internet access would be at a speed of one gigabit per second and to set this in context, schools connecting through this service will have the fastest internet connection of any school in the Southern Hemisphere. The collaboration and internet services will recover their costs through a charge to the school which is likely to be  less that the school’s current costs.

Bio

Nick is Director of Information Technology Services at The University of Queensland (UQ) and the Director of Australia’s National Computer Emergency Response Team, AusCERT, which is based at UQ. He is also a Director of both Higher Ed Systems Pty Ltd, and AARNet Pty Ltd, Chair of the Queensland Regional Network Organisation (QRNO), Chairman of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) in Queensland and is director of the project to establish the Australian Access Federation (AAF).

Prior to UQ, Nick worked on the development of anti-missile missile systems for Royal Navy Warships, before spending twenty years working for investment banks, eighteen years in London and then two years with Macquarie Bank in Sydney. He was Head of IT for the United Bank of Kuwait in London during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf war when there was a run on the bank and many strange requests from Baghdad!