Unless serious money is invested in an expansion of the third-level computer network, our universities and ITs will lose out and Ireland's economic development will be severely limited. So say academics and John Boland, chief executive of HEAnet. Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the Internet will be aware of service providers such as Indigo and Ireland on Line, but very few outside education are familiar with HEAnet, the third-level sector's service provider. HEAnet was established back in 1984 by the universities, with the support of the HEA, to provide a network of data connections between the institutions. Today, HEAnet is a not-for-profit organisation, operating a national network and providing universities and ITs with onward connections to all parts of the Internet. HEAnet's clients also include Forbairt, the HEA itself, the Dublin Institute for Advanced Science, RCSI and NCAD. Its Internet link to Europe is via Belfast and the UK academic network, Janet.
HEAnet's US Internet link boasts a six megabytes per second bandwidth - the highest in Ireland, Boland says. Despite its size, however, the link can be slow. "The line is fully utilised and we need to increase the bandwidth. In the past 18 months our US link has tripled in bandwidth size, but demand is still outstripping supply."
New college libraries - UL's came on stream earlier this year, DCU's is about to be built, while TCD's is still at the planning stage - will put huge pressure on the system, Boland predicts. "We have to gear ourselves up for constantly increasing usage."
Time was when email was a mildly useful addition to academic life. Today, Boland notes, "it is mission critical. Senior academics now can't do a day's work without access to the Internet. They can't schedule meetings, they can't contact colleagues abroad without email." In one university, when the system crashed over a Bank Holiday weekend, a lecturer in computing was "climbing the walls" because he was unable to make a bid for an EU-funded project - the only way he could do so was via the Internet. HEAnet is funded by both a grant from the HEA and user subscriptions. Client charges have increased by 75 per cent over the past 18 months and institutions are now "at the limit of what they can afford," Boland warns. In some instances, colleges are faced with either-or decisions: do they spend their IT allocation on more/ upgraded PCs or do they increase their use of the Internet? Boland says it's vital that all third-level students are encouraged to become Internet users. "It's essential that they are au fait with the Web and have the ability to create pages on the Internet. When they start work, they must hit the ground running."
Increasingly, students need access to the Internet for their course work. "Libraries no longer point students towards the bookshelves. They are now gearing up to help them find what they need on the Internet."
Ideally, every third-level student should have his or her own email address, Boland says. However, this one is a local issue. Some institutions give all students email addresses, in other colleges they have to apply and get the approval of lecturers. There is, he notes, "great resistance to levying students for their use of the Internet".
The biggest demand in both the US and Europe for broadband networking comes from the academic sector. Increasing the bandwidth to up to 150 megabytes per second is necessary, if Irish universities and colleges are to develop a variety of means of delivering education - distance learning, outreach programmes or video conference lecturing, for example.
Without increased broadband width, Ireland will be unable to develop telemedicine, which enables a surgeon in Dublin, say, to perform an operation which could be broadcast to other medical schools.
The move from the use of CD-ROMs as a third level resource to a web-based central service will also place further pressure on the Internet. "CD-ROMs are very expensive and there is a move on to develop a central service which will use the network to distribute information. Colleges will no longer need individual collections of CDROMS." For example, the Scientific Citation Index - an index of work in social science, the humanities and sciences, currently on CD-ROM, will shortly be available to HEAnet subscribers via the Internet.
But however good HEAnet's current network is, it is lagging behind our European neighbours. Britain, the Nordic countries, the Netherlands and Germany all enjoy the benefits of high-speed broadband, Boland says. The leap into high speed broadband will not come cheap. "It will require a major injection of government funding - around £5 million annually," HEAnet's chief executive notes. "We pride ourselves on our articulate, well-educated, high-tech work force, but increasingly the Internet is at the heart of what they are doing. If we don't train our people with that technology, our graduates won't be as attractive to companies. "If we can't provide high-quality researchers, overseas R&D centres will locate elsewhere."
