ANSPAG has organised experimental trials of Video on Demand and Video Teleconferencing systems from Monash University’s Testbed Facility. These systems have been demonstrated to members of the multimedia industry at the INFOG conference held in May 1997 at Cinemedia, which is an associate member of eMERGE (Figure 0-11). The Video on Demand system was playing MPEG-1 compressed audio and video across the EBN between Monash’s Clayton campus and Cinemedia in the Melbourne CBD and the Teleconferencing system used JPEG compression to move TV quality video across the EBN to allow real-time interaction between a speaker and an audience separated by considerable distance. A similar system was shown at the May ATUG (Australian Telecommunications Users Group) conference in Sydney, using the EBN between Melbourne and Sydney, many hundreds of kilometres apart.

Elaborating on what was stated in the previous section in order to describe the network used in the demonstrations - located in each of the major exchanges, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, are Alcatel switches which are capable of supporting over 1000 ATM interfaces. Connections between the switches are a combination of digital hierarchies operating at 155Mbits/s and 34Mbits/s and a link in Melbourne exists connecting Monash University and Cinemedia, which provides ATM network access to a video server at Monash from Cinemedia. Optical fibre cables connect the sites, and the OLTE - optical fibre line transmission equipment, on each side joins the ATM switches to the EBN. So the link from the Video Server and On Line Storage at the ANSPAG Testbed Facility is connected via optical fibre through the EBN to Cinemedia in order to give users at Cinemedia access to the digital data and the ability to view from a selection of compressed video assets in real-time.

These trials proved the feasibility of using ATM on the B-ISDN as a carrier for VOD systems using Telstra’s EBN to provide 35 Mbit/s connections from Monash University to other sites similarly connected, providing a connection between the server where the digital footage is stored and the place of demonstration with fast and reliable performance.

Figure 0-11 VOD trials on EBN