September / October 2005


Georgian College connects to ORION

Georgian College officially connected to ORION Sept. 22, the latest of Ontario's colleges of applied arts and technology to sign on to Ontario's advanced Research and Education (R&E) network.

"This is a huge advancement for the College and for our students," said Georgian President and CEO, Brian Tamblyn. "This new connectivity greatly enhances our ability to deliver advanced educational programs, especially our numerous on-site degree programs. We will now be able to work more easily and more quickly with our many partner institutions elsewhere in the province. This is yet a further step in our commitment to bring a full range of educational opportunities to residents of our catchment area."

ORION is Ontario's next-generation network, dedicated entirely to research and education, and the province's gateway to global networks, including Canada's CA*net 4, Internet2 in the U.S., GEANT in Europe and APAN in Asia.

As such, Georgian joins a global family of connected institutions, including all of Ontario's universities, most colleges of applied arts and technology, several teaching hospitals, research institutions and special research projects.

College faculty and students can now collaborate directly with colleagues at institutions throughout Ontario, across Canada and around the world at significantly higher bandwidth, within a province-wide network that is part of Ontario's "cyberinfrastructure".

"We're extremely pleased to see Georgian joining ORION," said network President/CEO Phil Baker. "Our purpose is to link researchers, educators and learners to one another to colleagues here at home and around the word, and that includes the wonderful facilities, talent and resources here at Georgian College."

"Among the immediate uses of the network is enhanced connectivity to such institutions as the University of Windsor, among others," Tamblyn said.

Through ORION, Georgian gains vastly enhanced access to major databases, online academic and research resources and digital libraries from around the world. The college can also participate fully in advanced videoconferencing, distributed computational modeling and visualization resources and simulation capabilities

ORION's speed is 100 to 1000 times faster than everyday networks used to inter-connect computers in businesses, schools, and homes, able to transmit the equivalent of 1.5 data CDs every second.

"Teaching and learning are being transformed as new instructional and learning technologies and resources become available. High-capacity networks are essential to next-generation classrooms, labs, music rooms and learning facilities," said Baker. "That's why it is so critical for Georgian and all of Ontario's postsecondary institutions to be connected to a shared networked infrastructure."

The college became officially connected after obtaining optical fibre to link up to ORION's Point of Presence (PoP) in Barrie, hosted by the Simcoe Country Broadband Network facilities, one of ORION's 22 PoPs throughout the province.


Back to Headlines