Connecting islands with IT

NORFOLK: Norfolk Island is located in the Pacific Ocean between Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia. It covers just over 34 square kilometers and was settled in 1856 by descendent's of the Bounty mutineers who moved there from Pitcairn Island.

The island’s remoteness and dependence on distant suppliers of goods and services, alongside its growing tourist industry, mean that residents and businesses are heavily dependent on the telecommunications infrastructure.

In July 2008, the CTO of Norfolk Telecom, the territory’s sole telecommunications provider, and his team called tenders for the supply of a WAN optimization solution that met the island’s key criteria. The successful tender needed to offer local Australian and New Zealand support, provide quality of service and traffic prioritisation over the WAN, and it was important that the acceleration worked across all applications on the network.

Norfolk Telecom considered several potential suppliers including Expand Networks and at the end of the selection process decided to trial the proposed Expand solution across the satellite segment of its core Cisco network.

Norfolk Telecom saw immediate benefits in bandwidth and traffic speed through the combination of compression, TCP acceleration for web traffic, and web and FTP caching provided within the Expand solution, as it shares in a recent press note.

“There is a long-term project aimed at linking Pacific islands such as Tahiti, New Caledonia and Hawaii into a fibre-optic network but it will be 2011 at the earliest before an alternative solution like that is available even if we are able to participate as the cost is very high. Meanwhile, there are quality, availability and commercial imperatives to maximize our use of the existing satellite links.” said  Stuart Robertson, Chief Technology Officer of Norfolk Telecom.

“All of Norfolk Island’s voice and data communications are dependent on parallel satellite links,” he added.

Since implementing Expand, Norfolk Telecom boasts of an overall increase between 25 and 50 per cent in bandwidth available across the network with gains of up to 100 per cent in some areas, dependent on traffic flow, and has saved on satellite costs by over $80,000.

Robertson commented, “Expand’s accelerator has ensured key community services, including the operations of the Supreme Court, can function without being inhibited by our remote location.”

The island’s voice traffic uses a carrier-grade voice compression system and international calls, along with all of the island’s data links are connected via satellite services. This includes all web, email, FTP, VPN and other Internet-based traffic.

There are few aspects of life and business on Norfolk Island that are not dependent on satellite comunications. The tourist industry depends on Internet bookings, businesses need to order almost all their goods and services via telephone and the Internet, and over 2000 residents rely on these links for personal communication.