I just come back from the MoU signing ceremony between JGN II and SingAREN, marking a beginning of a new high-speed 155mbps R&D link between Singapore and Japan. Early last year, I paid a courtesy visit to MIC/JGN office in Japan requesting them to open their 20mbps link to the R&D community¹ but I was politely turned down. However, they promised to include the R&D community if they managed to secure funding for the next phase. I am glad this little seed I planted comes to something :-)

Anyway, JGN II is project managed by NICT (which has an annual budget of 560M USD wow!). The original purpose of JGN is to provide dark fibers and L3 (IPv4 and IPv6) services connecting up the Japanese universities. Last year, they expanded their network with a OC192 (10Gbps) to StarLight (US) and a 20mbps to Singapore. Today, they expanded the 20mbps to 155mbps and also another 45mbps to Thailand.

So what are all these high-speed network used for? Well, it is basically up to our blue-sky imagination. But to start, in addition to the ongoing media industry projects, they lined up two more projects:

(1) a e-Learning project between Catholic High School and Primary/Secondary schools in Mitaka City – Students can attend virtual classes that seem as if they are attending in the same classroom.

(2) e-Health project between Singapore National Eye Centre and Asahikawa Medical College Hospital – Basically using 3D HDTV technology to allow eye patients to be examine and even operated remotely.

If you got any more ideas, I would love to hear them!

¹ Credit should also go to Konishi-sensei who has been urging me to talk to MIC.