Mr. Conor Lenihan T.D., Minister for Science, Technology, & Innovation, visiting Tyndall National Institute in Cork, one of Ireland’s leading research facilities, announced that it has demonstrated a ground-breaking advance in fibre-to-the-home broadband networks.
The breakthrough resulted from an EU-funded research collaboration, called PIEMAN, between BT, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia-Siemens Networks, the Centre for Integrated Photonics (CIP), and Ghent University and Tyndall.
Welcoming the collaboration, Minister Lenihan commended the research partners on their successful results. “Cutting-edge projects such as PIEMAN are helping to drive the development of next-generation networks, which are key enablers of the future Smart Economy.
“To enable the Smart Economy Ireland needs a robust, reliable and dynamic communications network. The exciting developments demonstrated at Tyndall National Institute today confirm that we can have the critical mass of innovation to compete in the global telecommunications market,” he said.
Minister Lenihan added “This project also clearly demonstrates the significant benefits accruing to Ireland and to Irish researchers from our involvement in Europe. I am delighted to see at first hand this concrete example of the direct relevance of European research programmes to the future development of enterprise in Ireland”.
“High speed optical fibre access networks are increasingly seen as the ultimate solution for supplying future broadband services to residential and business customers,” said Prof. Paul Townsend, Head of Photonics at Tyndall. “In the PIEMAN project, we have pushed the boundaries of access network design to create a new type of large-scale, high speed network that offers significant advantages compared to existing schemes. In particular, by increasing the network span from around 20km that is typical today to as much as 100km, the new scheme eliminates the need for many of the electronic switches and repeaters used in current networks.
Consequently, these new networks would potentially be much simpler and easier to manage with lower equipment and operational costs,” he explained.
Chris Clark, CEO, BT Ireland added “This new network has capabilities well beyond the fibre access networks being deployed commercially today. As well as extended span, the scheme increases both the number of users and the available bandwidths by as much as a factor of ten, compared to existing solutions. It also employs multiple colours of light to allow sharing of optical fibre and components across many sub-networks so that in total more than 16,000 customers can be supported from a single network hub. This potentially enables significant network simplification and cost reduction to be achieved.
“Today’s impressive network demonstration at the Science Foundation Ireland-funded advanced photonics systems lab at Tyndall, highlights the importance of continued investment in strategic research and development projects in Ireland, and the ability of SFI-funded researchers to leverage other funding sources,” said Prof. Frank Gannon, Director General of SFI.
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