English Transcript

Cập nhật 25/06/2008 15:16:00

For the past two years, around 30 million people in Asia and Europe have enjoyed the benefits of one of the world's fastest internet services called "Tein2" - the Trans Eurasia Information Network. It's funded by the EU, Asia and Australia and connects scientists, doctors and researchers in 10 Asian countries with Europe and Australia, at speeds of more than two gigabytes a second.

PODGER: Anyone who's ever tried to send a big file like a photo or music over the internet knows it's slow and frustrating. But imagine if you were trying to send a video of an eight-hour brain operation, or the paths taken by objects in the night sky. That's where TEIN2 comes to the rescue of scientists and doctors. It's much faster than dial-up and broadband. Linking into and building on big information networks in Asia and Europe, TEIN2 connects researchers and doctors in Europe with China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Australia.


PODGER: You can watch medical operations using normal internet - but the sound's bad, the picture's fuzzy. TEIN2 carries much more information - so an operation can be watched in high-definition detail, thousands of miles away. One doctor who relies on it is Chris Kimber, a Melbourne-based paediatrician. He's a regular visitor to Vietnam's National Hospital of Paediatrics. Recently, he carried out life-saving surgery on a little girl in Hanoi - and used TEIN2 to keep an eye on her from Australia.

KIMBER: What the T-E-N enabled us to do is to sit down and review that child three months after the operation and talk to the doctors about how she was going, what subsequent treatment she'd need, when we should perform further outpatient procedures on her - and it allowed me to monitor the child.

PODGER: TEIN2 and other giant high-speed networks around the world are revolutionising education. Kyushu University Hospital in Japan uses it to teach new surgical techniques to doctors in developing countries, who might not get to see them otherwise. Medical Professor Shuji Shimizu explains.

SHIMIZU: Now they don't have to go to other hospitals during the busy schedule, paying a lot of money and time, so this should be very helpful to them to learn these new surgical techniques.

PODGER: Professor Shimizu says the hospital's also begun using TEIN2 in lectures for medical students.

SHIMIZU: It was a very good experience for the students. Just a few weeks ago we connected to Korea for the first grade of the students, just a general lesson, and we first gave them a chance to see the real surgery - not in the real operating theatre - but through the internet from abroad.