SKA loss - Australia, NZ beaten by third-world broadband

Those who follow such things will know that New Zealand and Australia have been working very hard on trying to host the next generation of scientific advancement, the Square Kilometre Array, on this side of the world.

The SKA is worth billions of dollars but more importantly, would likely spin off a significant high-value sub-industry in Australasia if it was based here. It's basically a giant telescope - larger than has ever existed before - made up of a heap of satellite dishes collectively covering a million square metres.

Sound big? It is. The SKA central computer will have the processing power of around a billion PCs. It's reported to be so sensitive it'll be able to detect an airport radar on a planet 50 light years away. For those not scientifically minded, that's so far away it would take 50 years to get there if you were travelling at the speed of light - quite a long way really!

And boy will it produce some data. Initially 10GB/second to be exact, or 36 terabytes per hour 24 hours a day and seven days a week. And therein lies one of the major issues with hosting it here.

There's been a long process running for the last 5 or 6 years about where the giant telescope should be hosted, with the last two options remaining being a South African-led bid versus an Australian-led bid including hosting some of it in New Zealand.

As extensively reported over the weekend, sadly for us it looks like the South African-led bid is looking increasingly likely to succeed. While it's not fully done and dusted, it's been leaked that the committee exploring the bids in detail have recommended the African option for a number of reasons.

SciBlogs (one of the leading science blogsites) looks at why and notes that the bids are close, but one of the key differences is the significantly increased cost of power and data transfer (read: broadband) on this side of the world.

Yes you read that right - we might have just missed out on part-hosting one of the world's greatest scientific breakthroughs with net benefit in the billions because broadband's cheaper in the third world than here*. Youch.

Whatever happens, huge kudos to those working behind the scenes to try to get the telescope here.

A broad range of individuals have put in a huge effort including people like Sergei Gulyaev at AUT (who headed up the academic side of things) and Brett O'Riley, formerly of NZICT (who helped round up broad industry support).

It'll be a bugger if we do lose out, but it wasn't from lack of trying and all those involved should be proud of their efforts. And it aint over yet of course.

You can find out more about the Square Kilometre Array here and details of the Australia/New Zealand bid here.

* Slight dramatisation... there were other factors too.