News for and about the Internet2 community

["Greg Wood" <>]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts
Greg Wood                  Manjeet Singh, Ph.D.
Internet2                  SingAREN
(202) 872-9119       (+65) 778-9115

   



SINGAPORE AND THE UNITED STATES COLLABORATE TO DEVELOP ADVANCED INTERNET
TECHNOLOGIES AND APPLICATIONS

Washington DC - April 28, 1999 --  SingAREN (the Singapore Advanced Research
and Education Network) and the University Corporation for Advanced Internet
Development (UCAID), the US organization leading the Internet2 project
involving more than 140 US research universities, today announced that they
have signed an agreement to collaborate on the development of advanced
networking technologies and applications.  SingAREN is the first research
and education network in Asia to sign such an agreement with UCAID.

Dr Francis Yeoh, Director of SingAREN explained, "I view this collaboration
with UCAID as timely and strategic in nature, and in-line with Singapore's
aim to assimilate and deploy advanced networking technologies locally.  This
collaboration with UCAID will also enable SingAREN and the R&D community in
Singapore to play a more active role and contribute to Internet2 technology
developments globally."

"SingAREN is among the most forward-looking national research networking
organizations in the world.  We look forward to very productive
collaborations with the researchers involved in SingAREN," said Douglas Van
Houweling, President and CEO of UCAID.

Simultaneous signings of the MoU in Washington DC and in Singapore half way
around the world were connected by full screen digital videoconferencing
transmitted across 9,000 miles of advanced network. Two-way, high fidelity
digital video technology being developed as part of the Internet2 Digital
Video initiative, led by the International Center for Advanced Internet
Research (iCAIR), was used in the fully-interactive real time
videoconference, an area of ongoing collaboration among these institutions.

As part of today's announcement, SingAREN and Internet2 agree to:
· provide appropriate interconnection between and among their respective
members and networks for the purpose of development and pre-commercial
testing and use of advanced research and education applications;
· collaborate on the development of common standards and technical
implementations across their respective networks;
· promote collaboration between their constituent member organizations and
institutions relating to the development of next-generation networking and
applications in research and higher education; and
· encourage technology transfer from their joint endeavors to accelerate the
availability of new services and applications.

Through this collaboration with UCAID, SingAREN will connect to the Abilene
network, the new high-speed backbone network operating at 2.4 Gbps (OC48)
and above in the US, provided by UCAID together with several major
telecommunications corporations.

Internet2, a project of UCAID, is a collaborative effort by over 150 US
research universities working in partnership with industry leaders and U.S.
federal agencies to develop a new family of advanced Intenet applications
and technologies to meet emerging academic requirements in research,
teaching and learning. Internet2 is addressing this challenge by creating a
leading edge network capability, enabling a new generation of applications,
and working with industry and international partners to transfer new
technologies into the global Internet.

SingAREN, launched in November 1997, is a national initiative to create a
high-speed broadband network platform to support R&D and advanced technology
development in Singapore, serving users from academia, research
organisations and industry.  Within Singapore, this comprises an
experimental broadband network linking the two local universities and
several research organisations. Internationally, SingAREN currently has a 14
Mbps link to US and Canadian research networks through the STAR TAP in
Chicago, as well as a 2 Mbps link to research networks in Japan and Korea,
dedicated for research and education purposes. These international
connections enable collaborative research in areas such as high performance
computing, distributed databases, digital libraries, tele-medicine,
tele-manufacturing, distance education and advanced network research to be
carried out between Singapore researchers and their counterparts in the US,
Canada, Japan, Korea and Europe.

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