GrangeNet has recently been granted additional funding to extend its network further until December 2006. Earlier this year, GrangeNet updated its network by putting in some TDM optical switching.

"We did that because we are a high-performance network, not just one with big bandwidth. It's incredibly important, especially in real-time science that the latency and jitter is as small as we can possibly make it," Davis said.

"We're running two-and-a-half milliseconds of latency between Canberra and Sydney and jitter that is almost impossible to measure. We've also got stacks of headroom which is needed in research for moving terabytes of data from point to point quickly and suddenly."

Based on Cisco ONS15454 switches, the extended network aims to enhance the collaboration potential by extending the service offerings from traditional R&E (Layer 3) to include LANs (Layer 2) and Light-Paths (Layer 1).