28 October 1999

On referendum night people around Australia will be walking right into a virtual tally room - all from the comfort of their homes, while sitting in front of their home computer screens.

On November 6, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) will be hosting a "virtual tally room" on the net, where users will be able to access up-to-the-minute referendum results.

"The AEC's web site will be the main means of transmitting referendum results to the media and other interested people on referendum night and the period following," said Assistant Director of Information for the AEC, Ms Silvana Puizina.

According to Marcus Dawe, the Managing Director of EDIME Internet Agency, the company that is managing and developing the site, the project is believed to be the largest live Internet event in Australia.

"We believe that this will be Australia's largest on-line event to date," Mr Dawe said. "EDIME has established a web-based output facility for the AEC's mainframe database, and over the referendum period the results of the count will be published simultaneously to three web centres in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne using Alta Internet Business Centre's hosting infrastructure."

"There will be a direct feed to the website from the AEC's Referendum Night Results System. Post referendum updates will be done every hour."

The virtual tallyroom will show live results tables containing a range of referendum results statistics. A national graph screen will also show a live graph illustrating the results on a state and national basis.

"While it is difficult to predict the level of usage of such a site, we are expecting it to be an extremely popular addition to the AEC website, which has been one of the nation's busiest in recent weeks," said Ms Puizina.

"There have been over 140,000 page views recorded in the last two weeks alone and it is expected that it will become even busier as we approach Referendum day."

Further information:

Silvana Puizina
Assistant Director Information, AEC
02 6271 4431

Marcus Dawe
Managing Director
EDIME Internet Agency
02 6295 6300

Technical information:

• Sydney will have the largest of the three webcentres, with 155Mbit bandwidth capacity, serving up to 20,000 users per second at peak usage across 24 web servers. Sydney will serve users from NSW, Queensland and overseas. Melbourne, serving the southern states and Western Australia, will have at least 24MBits of bandwidth and Canberra will provide bandwidth and feed serving with 16Mbit into Optus.
• An average hit to the site is expected to be around 10k in size.
• There will be a 100Mbit link to Telstra and a 155 Mbit ATM link into Optus, both provided by Alta Internet Business Centre