Intune Networks receives European funding in £1.7M ultra-fast internet access fibre technology project

Belfast, 10th May 2011 – Intune Networks, a pioneer in packet optical transport technology, has secured funding in a £1.7million multinational initiative aiming to deliver ultra-high-speed internet access to meet the growing needs of homes and businesses across Europe.

Intune Networks’ Active Distributed and Dynamic Optical Network Access Systems (ADDONAS) will aim to develop photonic technology and systems that would enable widespread broadband access of at least 1 Gbit/s by 2015-20. Intune Networks will receive £520,000 funding as part of the wider programme.

The PIANO+ initiative, spearheaded by the European Commission (EC) and co-funded by the UK government-backed Technology Strategy Board, called for collaborative research and development proposals under the EC’s ERA-NET Plus scheme . PIANO+ aims to promote investment in the development of next-generation optical access technologies that will significantly reduce the operational and capital costs of super fast broadband by removing local exchanges.

Using the funding from PIANO+, Intune Networks has developed a low-cost, lower energy technology that will enable ultra-fast broadband speeds in the future while still meeting the short-term needs of the system operators and users. ADDONAS architecture was selected because it aims to bring faster broadband connections while reducing the total energy bill for operators and users by over 50%.

A similar programme was initiated by Google in 2010. Google has started building and testing ultra-fast broadband access networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States including Kansas City, aiming to offer communities up to 100 times faster broadband than most Americans currently have .

“It is apparent with the roll out of Google’s Kansas City initiative that ultra-fast broadband is becoming increasingly important as demands for bandwidth multiply”. “The ADDONAS architecture will change today’s concept of access networks relying on passive transport elements into distributed networks using elements in the delivery services,” commented John Dunne, CTO, Intune Networks. “ADDONAS will achieve this by using a three stage distributed ‘Layer 2’ switch to compress the metro and access networks.”

The ADDONAS architecture aims to make the network programmable and allow it to be engineered to deliver quality of service (QoS) guarantees for end to end users. As well as be scalable up to 64TBit/s of total capacity to enable economical end to end support for symmetrical 1Gbit/s access to end users, it aims to provide full transmission for both point to point and switched services.

“A wave of applications is driving the need for the internet to deliver guaranteed quality of service which it is unable to do at the moment,” said Greg May, Technology Strategy Board. “This joint transnational approach towards supporting developments in fibre access technology is harnessing the collaborative expertise of Europe’s most innovative companies to facilitate a common technology platform. We want to see photonic technology and systems for a scalable, future-proofed and energy-efficient access network.”