Global Area Network – bringing the Internet to remote Australia

The Upper Murray Regional Library has been operating since 1950 and covers the Cities of Albury and Wodonga and the Shires of Corowa, Holbrook, Hume, Indigo, Towong, Tumbarumba and Urana. The Hume and Urana Shires are served exclusively by the Mobile Library. The Mobile Library, as the name suggests, is housed in a medium rigid pantech and provides all the traditional library services. Members have access to the full range of regional resources. The mobiles carry a combined stock of 10,969
items in all formats. For the year 2000/2001 they processed 73,923 loans and 5,736 reservations and dealt with 6,882 requests for information. The Mobile Libraries serve an area of 28,211 square kilometres stopping at 72 sites across the region on a two-week cycle.

Who benefits from the Mobile Library?
Anyone can visit the mobile library and benefit from books and other services it offers. The Mobile Library caters for the whole community, from preschoolers and school children to the more elderly members of the community. Regular stops are made anywhere and everywhere! The schedule of sites visited by the UMRL is reviewed every 6 months. The terrain of the sites varies dramatically, from the valleys at the foot of the Snowy Mountains and the Victorian High Country to the plains of Urana. These varied locations have meant traditional forms of connection, ie power poles and phone sockets are not readily available. The constraints of geography and the limitations to traditional connectivity in remote areas has meant the Mobile Libraries have been unable to provide anything but the most basic of services. In particular, online services have been out of the question. “We wanted to make the library service as equitable as possible across the whole region and it has been a long term goal of the UMRL to have all branches online with full, live access to the library” said Dale Cousens, Information Systems Manager. “We constantly review our communications options and when we first heard about the mobile GAN service and particularly MPDS, we thought that we may have found a solution,” said Dale.

“The funding we have received through ‘Networking the Nation’ is allowing us to install the hardware required and set up the service as a pilot”. “The public now have access to the Internet and the staff have real time access to our Library Management System. Xantic has provided a satellite solution which has allowed us to maintain the flexibility of our service whilst providing the maximum level of connectivity for our customers and staff.” “The GAN service has meant we are able to offer a complete library service to the people living in remote areas, this service can be easily deployed anywhere regardless of the location or facilities available”.

Inmarsat Global Area Network (GAN)
The GAN service allows you to stay connected to the company LAN, send large amounts of data, email and even participate in a video conference with complete mobility, from anywhere in the world. All this can be done using not much more than a PC and a laptop sized satellite terminal. The GAN service offers: 

•  Full mobile ISDN service at 64 kbps
• Mobile Packet Data Service (MPDS), which
  allows for continuous and low cost online
  connections. Costs are minimised because
  you are only charged for the actual
  transmitted data packets rather than for the
  time you are online
• The GAN mobile voice service offers all the
  features of the Inmarsat Mini-M.

Need more information?
email to: service@xantic.net