May / June 2006


ORION expanding network - accelerates northern backup

A significant upgrade is expanding the reach and capabilities of the ORION network, in collaboration with CANARIE, Canada's national R&E network organization.



With significant financial support from CANARIE, new segments are being installed across Ontario, making use of Nortel ROADM technology from Ottawa to Windsor, linking the province and Canada to global R&E network hubs in New York City and Chicago.

ORION and CANARIE are among the first in the world to deploy "reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexing" (ROADM) technology, which will allow ORION and CANARIE engineers to reconfigure optical routes on demand through software. The RISQ network in Quebec recently announced a similar upgrade with ROADM technology

ORION Senior Director of Engineering and Operations Sam Mokbel says the upgrade, in addition to making the latest optical transport technologies available to ORION users, will also greatly enhance ORION's ability to provide backup services. It will also enable MPLS-based services and support applications that require QOS, such as interactive video-based applications.

The expansion includes new high-speed fibre segments between North Bay and Peterborough and between St. Catharines and London. It also includes a routing layer upgrade.

Meanwhile, Northern Ontario's ORION-connected institutions are applauding the nearly $500,000 investment in a new high-speed optical fibre circuit that came on stream in May, providing critical backup to the North's connection to the global grid of high-speed research and education (R&E) networks.

The new service provides failsafe backup to as many as 18 northern colleges, universities, school boards and other organizations that rely on their connection to ORION and their link to Canada's CAnet 4 and global networks.

Northern institutions that rely on ORION include Laurentian, Lakehead and Nipissing Universities, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, the Boreal, Cambrian, Confederation, Northern, Sault and Georgian Colleges, as well as Contact North/Contact Nord and several school boards.

Service outages, triggered by fibre cuts, accidents or equipment failure, spurred ORION and CANARIE to accelerate plans to introduce backup services to the ORION locations north of Toronto. CANARIE invested $400,000 towards the project. ORION provided nearly $100,000 in equipment and labour costs.

Nearly 60 per cent of the ORION's network, as much as 2,500 of ORION's 4,200 kilometres of network fibre is now covered by the new GigE (Gigabit Ethernet) service, which represents data transmission capability of 1,000 megabits per second.


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