Network Innovations for Outages Caused by Disasters

One of REANNZ’s top priorities is ongoing enhancements to the national network – enabling our researchers and educators to access the infrastructure and connectivity they need to advance their work. This initiative – which comes under the banner of the National Network Strategic Review – took a significant step forward in 2023, with the signing of an agreement with One NZ to deliver a new 100G national optical backbone network, after a robust tendering and selection process with key telco providers.

Aaron Murrihy, REANNZ’s Technical Lead for Networks, explains that key considerations in selecting a vendor were the ability to scale up bandwidth into the future to facilitate member growth, and improving the availability of the network by offering more diversity and resiliency.

Aaron notes: “Under the new partnership REANNZ, its members and users will benefit from advanced features introduced in One NZ’s new Ciena Wave Logic 5 optical network (which maximises the capacity of the network by merging the channel bandwidth); and flex-grid’s ‘self-healing’ properties which reduce the impact of network outages when cables are damaged in natural disasters and other events. Put simply, the optical restoration technology allows the light signals that carry the data to change their path after a fibre cut, restoring services much more quickly than manual repairs.”

This initiative will ensure that REANNZ and the network remain well equipped to support the next generation of researchers, innovators and educators – helping them connect and collaborate with the national and international community, build capability and solve data transfer challenges.