Inside the report can learn about what was achieved in line with our strategic goals:

Delivering Australia’s Research and Education Network

AARNet’s primary function is operating a world-class IP (Internet Protocol) network, providing highly available and resilient national and international telecommunications services to meet the unique needs of the research and education sector.

For 2016, our network availability was 99.982%. Total traffic across the network grew substantially again in 2016 – up 40% on 2015.

In 2016, AARNet completed the 100 Gbps upgrade to the Southern Cross Trans-Pacific Optical Research Testbed (SXTransPORT) dual submarine optical fibre links. These connect Sydney to North America, providing 100 Gbps access in Sydney, Auckland, Honolulu, Kailua-Kona, Seattle and Los Angeles.

Our Infrastructure Development Group continued to deliver network upgrades and expansions to the network’s fibre footprint, including the completion of a number of projects funded under the Federal Government’s National Research Network Project: Sydney Rings – Penrith Loop; Brisbane Metropolitan Ring stage 2; Radio Astronomy Research Network. We also delivered 10G upgrades and diverse paths to many customers, and more…

Growing the Research and Education community

Throughout 2016, we continued to connect organisations working at the forefront of health and medical research to the network, as well as K-12 schools and TAFEs in metropolitan and regional areas around the country.

Many of Australia’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums, also known as GLAMs, are now connected to AARNet. Those who joined our community in 2016 include the Australian Museum, Queensland Museum, ACMI X, State Library of NSW and more…

Building Services Capability

Our focus is on providing services that leverage the network to enable seamless collaboration, data flow and mobility for the research and education sector. By the end of 2016, we completed migrations to the AARNet4 backbone for the majority of our 38 shareholder customers.

The CloudStor phenomenon showed no sign of slowing down, clocking more than 29,584 active accounts, 132.12 TB data stored and 100,166 files by the end of 2016.

Zoom, a cloud based video access service, continued to experience strong growth month-on-month in 2016, reaching 21,783 users by the end of the year, up 200% on the previous year.

Also highlighted are the work of Enterprise Services, collaborations with CERN, cyber security, digital transformation at AARNet and more…

Use Case Stories

We also throw the spotlight on activities and research at our customer institutions made possible by connectivity to AARNet:

• Australian regional data hub for Copernicus data
• A dedicated radio astronomy research network
• Future network technologies Global access to world’s largest life sciences data collections
• Big data analytics for the Koala Genome project needs a big network
• eduroam in schools takes off around Australia
• Smart data access for next-gen climate modelling research

View the AARNet 2016 Annual Report (PDF (9 MB)