MINISTER FOR Communications Pat Rabbitte has asked ESB Telecoms to assist in the establishment of the Exemplar test and trial network.
Although the final scope of ESB Telecoms’s involvement has yet to be decided, it is likely it will provide access to its fibre-based communications network, which largely runs in parallel with the main electricity transmission network and also provides network engineering services.
Tom Bambury, ESB Telecoms’s general manager, said planning for the network was at an early stage but the State utility would assist in getting Exemplar “out of the lab and into the field”.
Mr Rabbitte made the announcement at the opening of the TM Forum Management World 2011 conference in Dublin this week, which was attended by several thousand telecommunications industry executives.
The Government has invested €10 million in the creation of the Exemplar network, which is designed to foster research and development into next generation telecoms technologies.
“Most impressively, the technology being used, optical-burst packet switching and transport, is an innovative solution to the biggest challenge that your industry faces: it offers massive bandwidth at lower cost using lower energy,” said Mr Rabbitte. “It offers the ability to provide bandwidth as a service and has been proven in our Exemplar test bed.”
Irish companies Intune Networks, Openet and Amartus, working in association with BT, recently completed a proof of concept on the Exemplar called Dynamic Desktop. Mr Rabbitte said the Exemplar technology will now be installed “on fibre in a live environment, so that companies can test new products and services with real customers and users”.
Mr Rabbitte also said he was creating a Next Generation Broadband Taskforce, which would include “the CEOs of all of the large network owners” and would draw up national policy on the delivery of next generation broadband.
Management World 2011 was held in Dublin for the first time, having previously been held in the French city of Nice.
The event focuses on the coming together of the internet and telecoms networks, according to Martin Sjostrand, a senior Ericsson executive.
“Voice and text were either/or services; you either connected the call or you didn’t the same with text,” said Mr Sjostrand.
“When you put internet protocol services on the phone it becomes much more complex to deliver a quality user experience,” he said.
In order to ensure a quality experience to the user, telecoms operators needed to be able to monitor their networks in real time, which he said created an opportunity for Ericsson and other equipment and software vendors.
TM Forum’s Management World has already been booked to take place at the Convention Centre Dublin next year.
