ORION is adding three Ontario communities to the network's official Points of Presence (PoPs), the first extension of the network's core backbone since ORION's launch in 2003.

Chatham, Orillia and Kirkland Lake are the new locations being added to the network, growing ORION's PoPs from 22 to 25. It is part of the recently announced $6.5 million network upgrade, jointly funded by ORION and CANARIE.

Site preparation has begun and the network equipment will be installed and turned up in the spring.

"This is really exciting for us," says ORION President and CEO Dr. Darin Graham. "Expanding our footprint, especially to more rural and northern regions, is important to our ability to reach out and extend Ontario's innovation backbone capabilities to more communities."

The Chatham PoP, hosted by Hydro One Telecom is scheduled to go live in April. It will open the door to organizations and institutions to connect directly to the network in that region. It will provide the primary network connection path to ORION's PoP in Sarnia.

The new Orillia PoP, also scheduled to go live in April, will provide a direct link to Lakehead University's main Thunder Bay campus, to the university's new, state-of-the-art facility in Orillia. The academic building, at 500 University Avenue, opened for classes in September and is Canada's first and only Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED©) Platinum campus.

Lakehead University's new facility at its Orillia campus.

Still to be resolved is whether the new PoP will be hosted within the new Orillia facility, or whether it will be hosted by ORION's network partner, Atria Networks, at an adjacent network location along ORION's current fibre infrastructure between ORION's Peterborough and North Bay PoPs. "We're working with our colleagues at Lakehead to finalize those decisions," says ORION Senior Director of Engineering and Network Operations Sam Mokbel.

The Kirkland Lake network connection site, scheduled to go live in June, will be hosted at ORION's northern network partner, Ontera, at its network facilities just outside the community. It will provide a direct network path to the Northern College campus in Kirkland Lake and will also connect to the RiSQ network in Quebec via new fibre to Rouyn-Noranda.

The new PoP will expand ORION's Northern Ontario footprint from five to six communities, including current locations in Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Timmins, North Bay and Sault Ste. Marie.

As with Northern College and Lakehead University, these new PoPs allow northern postsecondary and other institutions to extend their home campus network infrastructures to their growing satellite locations, in the case of Thunder Bay's Lakehead, a distance of more than 1,200 kilometres.

"This really shows the value of a network like ORION," says Dr. Graham. "It effectively eliminates distance as a barrier and enables our institutions to more effectively extend their own reach to new locations and extend their availability to more Ontarians."

The Kirkland Lake PoP also supports a unique collaboration between ORION and RiSQ, Quebec's advanced research and education network.

This extension, part of the ORION and CANARIE-funded network upgrade, will directly link the two networks and extend ORION's network infrastructure to help connect RiSQ's research and education institutions in the Rouyn and Abitibi-Témiscamingue region, in exchange for a redundancy path through Quebec for ORION. "It's a win-win for both RiSQ and ORION," says Dr. Graham.

More details on this new collaboration between ORION, RiSQ and CANARIE will be announced in the New Year.

In all three cases, institutions can connect to ORION at 1GE bandwidth, scalable to 10GE on demand.

The new sites open the door to more organizations to connect to ORION, including several district school boards and other institutions that are currently too far from an existing ORION connection point. The additional locations improve the range of connectivity options for several organizations, explains Tim Kim, ORION's Business Development Consultant, who is in discussions with institutions looking at options to connect to ORION.

"This finally allows them to consider joining the advanced network community and to take advantage of the new capabilities their connection to ORION can introduce to the students, faculty and staff in those institutions," he says.

The expansion is part of ORION's strategy to extend the network's footprint to additional Ontario regions and communities and to provide greater opportunities for Ontario's postsecondary institutions, school boards and others to extend their own network links to remote or satellite campuses.

ORION currently provides remote campus connectivity to 10 institutions, provisioned through ORION's popular VLAN service.