August 2003
Engineering team in final sprint to complete network
All but three of ORION’s 22 PoP sites are now up and running, allowing users to connect directly to the ORION network, says ORION Project Director Sam Mokbel.
The network’s Engineering Team is traveling the province to connect institutions to the network and conduct testing. The latest PoP to come on line is the network connection point in Sarnia, being connected this week.
Mokbel reports that ORION has also started routing traffic from CANARIE’s CAnet* 4 and the commercial Internet.
The PoPs at North Bay, Timmins and Sault Ste. Marie are all that remain to connect to the 3,700-kilometre network. Mokbel expects they will come on line within the next eight weeks.
In the past two weeks, 15 institutions, including colleges, universities and others, have already signed up for ORION connectivity, through the network PoP (Point of Presence) in their community. Those institutions are being connected this week and will start to access the network to link to CAnet* 4 and the Internet.
ORION expects to have more than 100 institutions signed up by the end of 2005.
The Ontario Ministry of Enterprise, Opportunity and Innovation and Ontario’s SuperBuild Corporation are ORION’s primary funding partner, with an investment of $32.3 million. The federal government has invested $3.4 million through CANARIE, Canada’s Advanced Internet Development Organization, which operates CA*net 4.
Additional private and public sector investments over the next three years will bring the value of the ORION project to over $78 million.
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