The University of Queensland has signed a $500,000 contract with communications firm ATI Australia to install a broad-band microwave link from the St Lucia campus to the UQ Ipswich campus, 40km to the west of Brisbane.
The link will be operational by the end of this year, as staff move to the UQ Ipswich campus before the first student intake in February, 1999.
The "two hop" link employs a microwave dish on top of the University's 12-storey Chemistry Building. This dish is already utilised in the 35 Megabits-per-second link between the University's St Lucia and Gatton College campuses which are 80km apart.
Signals will be transmitted to a tower at Mt Coot-tha, then re-transmitted to a 17-metre microwave tower to be installed on the eastern side of the UQ Ipswich campus, adjacent to the Ipswich showgrounds.
From this tower, the signals will be re-transmitted to the UQ Ipswich Communications building, and re-distributed around the new campus.
UQ Ipswich campus manager Warren Kerswill said the high-speed link would allow the movement of large packets of information between the campuses. The 155 Megabits-per-second link is capable of expanding in increments of 155Mbps.
The main use of the link will be to support communications traffic such as library resources, Web CT (a Web development product), email messages and the World Wide Web.
Mr Kerswill said the link would allow the UQ Ipswich campus to broadcast to the world, and expand access for UQ staff and students at other campuses to share knowledge through new technologies.
UQ Ipswich would be a state-of-the-art flexible delivery centre using the very latest technology, where students could pace themselves and choose different ways of learning. Small groups would interact, using learning methods including face-to-face teaching, the Internet, interactive videos and telephone tutorials.
He said while microwave links were common between University campuses in Australia, the capacity of the new microwave link had impressed Victorian universities during a UQ visit to new campus developments at Sunbury (Victoria University of Technology) and at Lilydale (Swinburne University of Technology) in late July.
Media: For further information, contact Mr Kerswill, telephone 07 3365 8225.
