Awards

Left to right: André Gygax (Melbourne & CEET), Chris Leckie (Melbourne & CEET), Kate Cornick (CEET), Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Science and Research the Hon Chris Evans, Katrina Franks (CEET), Tim Marshall (Alcatel-Lucent), and Simon Harriss (Alcatel-Lucent). Photo credit: BHERT, Leisa Hunt.

Last night the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) and Alcatel-Lucent were awarded the prestigious Best Research & Development Collaboration award at the Business and Higher Education Round Table (B-HERT).

Professor Rod Tucker, CEET Director stated, “Outcomes of the strong collaborations between the University of Melbourne and Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs staff have resulted in major research advances, and it is wonderful to have this recognised.”

Alcatel-Lucent Australia President and Managing Director, Sean O’Halloran said, “Energy efficiency is a major and growing challenge for our industry and won’t be overcome without collaboration. This is great recognition for the CEET team and further indication that the Australian ICT sector can be a major focal point in the global race to reduce the internet power drain.”

CEET research has already resulted in three patents, including one focused on an energy-efficient data encoding scheme for optical signals in fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) access networks. This technology has the potential to reduce the energy consumption of future FTTP networks, such as the NBN. The second and third patents focus on improved receiver techniques that are able to detect a type of low power signals, and have positive implications for the energy consumption of wireless networks.

The research findings are already driving potential new and novel products, setting new industry standards in energy efficiency in the communications sector, raising awareness of energy efficiency in telecommunications.

Today communications technology consumes up to 2% of the world’s electricity supply but this rapid growth in broadband demand could lift internet energy consumption to 5-10% of the world’s electricity supply and associated emissions by the year 2020. This worrying trend is placing new environmental challenges on telecommunications companies.

The collaborations underway at CEET are delivering tangible results towards more energy efficient telecommunications networks, while positioning Australia’s R&D sector at the forefront of global ‘green ICT’ efforts.

Recently, CEET released its 2012 Annual Report.

The Centre was launched in March 2011 by Alcatel-Lucent, the University of Melbourne, and the Victorian State Government as the world’s first research centre exclusively dedicated to energy-efficient telecommunications technologies. Its research efforts cover a broad range of telecommunications network infrastructures and how those elements can increase their energy efficiency.

For more information contact Kat Franks by email on call 03 8344 7682 .