The funding requested by the Department of Higher Education and Training and the Tertiary Education Network of SA (Tenet) to further extend points of presence on the existing network to strengthen universities research and teaching capabilities has been approved.
According to the department, an amount of R28 million has been approved to partially fund the project, which aims for Internet access networks in rural higher education campuses.
The project will see the backbone network being extended to points of presence in Grahamstown, Makhado, Middleburg Nelspruit, Pietermaritzburg, Polokwane, Potchefstroom, Vanderbijl Park and Witbank while Tenet will secure at least 50 rural campuses to the presence points.
The first phase of the project, funded by the Department of Science and Technology for a three year period ending on 31 March, connected seven major cities and towns to a high speed (10GBps) network, the department says.
According to the department this provided 70 university and research campuses with high speed connection of at least one gigabyte per second to points of presence on the high speed backbone.
“It also delivered optical fibre metropolitan access network in Johannesburg that interconnects seven different campuses of the Universities of Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand, high-speed connection from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) satellite application centre at Haretbeesthoek to the CSIR main campus and the Wits main campus and optical fibre access networks in Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria.”
Overhauling research
“The funds had been approved because the capacity of universities to conduct research was of great importance as it would allow each university to have all its campuses connected at sufficiently high bandwidths,” says Nzimande.
This enables shared production and distribution of teaching and learning materials, deployment of centralised administrative systems and processes for the efficient management of multi-campus institutions, he says.
“The project will also enable access to high performance scientific computing facilities and other educational and research resources via the existing backbone and equitable internet access to other research and education networks globally."
He reckons, by being able to provide additional funding toward the completion and extension of this network coverage, there will be enormous benefit to institutions that are not able to connect to the network or who are not able to connect at sufficiently high speed.
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