COMPUTING resources at Hongkong's tertiary institutions received a shot in the arm last week with the commissioning of new high-speed network links between campus data centres.
The new fibre optic-base network was set up to cope with the expected ''rapidly exploding'' rise in data traffic over the Hongkong Academic and Research Network (HARNET) during the next few years.
The high-capacity network infrastructure should make way for new areas of multimedia network services between campuses, creating an opening for new teaching and joint research methodology.
HARNET was set up in 1986 to let institutions share computing and data resources, but had become hopelessly congested because of the limited capacity of the 4,800 bits per second (bps), according to University and Polytechnic Computer Centre (UPCC) director, Dr Ng Nam.
New network facilities are based on the high-speed 1.544 Mbps (million bps) T1 facilities used by Hongkong Telecom in its commercial LANline service. (Telecom, through its Hongkong Telecom Foundation, supported construction of the new facility with a grant of $4 million over three years.) The seven institutions are connected in a ring configuration, which gives the network an ''inherent diversity'', because data traffic can flow in the reverse direction if a break occurs anywhere in the network.
''This is a major upgrade for us,'' said Dr Ng.