Foundation Projects

This project is based on research that came out of Prof. Muriel Médard's group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which the team at Auckland University built upon with the help of Steinwurf ApS, a startup company Prof. Médard co-founded in Denmark with a German colleague, Prof. Frank Fitzek.

In previous ISIF-funded projects, the University of Auckland deployed their coding technology in the form of coded UDP tunnels across satellite links and added our home-grown titration technology to keep excess code overhead of the links. Steinwurf and its founders remain supportive of the project.

For the current project, which was originally planned in a slightly different form for the Chatham Islands but then shifted to Kiribati, the University of Auckland is partnering with Kiribati's Ministry for Information, Communication and Technology. The project has established a free WiFi hub in the precinct of the Ministry complex in Betio, Tarawa, that connects to the Internet via a coded tunnel to the University of Auckland, running via a Starlink connection. Alternatively, the hub can be connected via an uncoded Starlink connection, allowing the project team to compare the performance.

The simulator lab, which has been supported by two previous ISIF grants, is based at the University of Auckland's School of Computer Science.

The School has also supported the lab with significant amounts of CAPEX, space, staff time and scholarship contributions over the last few years and also serves as a conduit for graduate students involved in the research. The University also has close links with PICISOC, the Pacific chapter of the Internet Society, who have been very supportive of this work in the past, as well as with a number of Internet Service Providers in the Pacific Islands during the pilot field deployments.