The network was been ordered by the Papua New Guinea Academic and Research Network, a consortium of private and state universities. The project was managed by Oceanic Broadband Solutions, a leading regional ISP and integrator of telecom solutions (www.oceanicbroadband.com.au)
Papua New Guinea still lags with one of the lowest internet usage ratios in the world. While more then one out of five World citizens on average can access the Internet today, with some countries such US, Australia, New Zealand or Northern Europe exceeding the 70% rate, internet penetration is still as low as 2.8% among the 6 million citizens of Papua New Guinea, according to Internetworldstats.com.
The new Papua New Guinea Academic and Research Network has been built to enable students and scientists to access global internet services, online knowledge resources, remote processing power, as well as to conduct and attend lectures over broadband video conferencing.
So far, 21 ground sites have been equipped with secure broadband satellite connection. Each site features an UDcast’s UDgateway that provides protocol acceleration, caching and security in conjunction with iDirect VSAT modems.
Tony Waters, Director of Oceanic Broadband, said that "UDcast technology has been proven in Europe to be secure and optimized for VSAT, ensuring high throughput capability over the VPN tunnel. Our customer in Papua New Guinea additionally liked the features of the UDgateway appliance such as caching and SMTP relay to speed up their WAN access for the 300 to 600 student PC users per University".
UDcast’s UDgateway satellite appliances are currently deployed at several thousand sites around the world, enabling multiple application including e-learning, governmental networks, emergency systems, inter-banking transactions, green energy generation management, maritime communication and more.
“Satellite communications is the easiest and least expensive way to provide broadband access wherever there is no terrestrial internet infrastructure. Technological advancements such as IP network optimization, improve the capacity and build the business case for the continued growth of satellite services in many regions.” said Antoine Clerget, CEO and co-founder of UDcast.
