Bell Labs, Melbourne Uni &Vic Gov't form 'green telecom' R&D team

Stuart Corner
Friday, 30 April 2010 09:34

Business IT - Technology

Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs, the University of Melbourne and the Victorian State Government are to set up a joint research centre to focus on energy efficient technology for the communications industry.

The centre will "draw on Bell Labs' decades of achieving breakthrough innovations and its extensive experience in managing collaborative research projects as well as on the University of Melbourne's world-class research in telecommunications network infrastructure."

Consortium to cut mobile network energy use
Separately, Alcatel-Lucent has joined 14 other telecommunications service providers, component and infrastructure vendors and academic institutions in a consortium 'EARTH' (Energy Aware Radio and neTwork tecHnologies), whose goal is to achieve a 50 percent reduction in the energy consumption of 4G mobile wireless communication networks within the next two-and-a-half years (see page 2)

The Victorian facility, the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET), will be based at the University of Melbourne. It will have a staff of researchers and technology experts that will build to 22 during the next three years.

Bell Labs and the University of Melbourne will share governance of the centre, which will conduct research into how a broad range of telecommunications network infrastructure elements can be made more energy efficient.

Both the University and Bell Labs are members of the GreenTouch initiative, a global, industry-wide consortium formed to achieve a dramatic improvement in energy efficiency by driving a radical redesign of communications networks. Technologies developed at the centre will be used to further the GreenTouch initiative and its objectives.

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