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Home > About Us > News Room > News Releases > TRLabs and Optimum Develop High Performance, Fully-Programmable Communications Hardware Platform TRLabs and Optimum Develop High Performance, Fully-Programmable Communications Hardware Platform
January 16, 2006 -- January 16, 2006 - Calgary, AB - TRLabs and Optimum Communications Services, Inc. (Optimum) have announced the successful completion of a joint project to develop a multi-purpose, remotely reprogrammable hardware platform suitable for carrier class data/telecom and computing applications.
This milestone marks the completion of the first phase of a three-stage joint research and development (R&D) project between Optimum and TRLabs to test and demonstrate Optimum’s innovative, self-optimizing and self-organizing MPLS-based network solution on TRnet - a 3000 km, 10 Gbps wavelength ring connecting five TRLabs sites across western Canada. Optimum’s patent-pending algorithms, which are physically implemented on the programmable hardware platform, continuously optimize network capacity allocation based on the real-time data traffic distribution patterns between network access points.
"This technology partnership exemplifies TRLabs’ capability to work with companies to accelerate product development cycles and company growth,” says TRLabs President & CEO Dr. Roger Pederson.
Under the terms of the project, TRLabs is able to use the per-application programmable hardware units for its internal research purposes, while Optimum maintains exclusive intellectual property rights to its program code that causes the programmable hardware units to perform the novel, real-time data traffic pattern adaptive network optimization functionality. “This win-win arrangement provides TRLabs with the capacity to undertake research in a variety of areas such as web server acceleration, network security, and novel Internet and multi-protocol routing, switching and transport network technologies,” says TRLabs Director Research Development and Project Manager Dr. Dave Morley.
"Optimum is extremely satisfied with the quality of engineering, testing and project management provided by TRLabs,” says Optimum CEO Mark Sandstrom. “We look forward to continuing our project with network level testing and demonstrations that emulate actual commercial network service contract scenarios using TRnet. As a network service provider with core competencies in real-time network optimization, engaging TRLabs to develop and test the fully programmable hardware platform to our specifications has been extremely beneficial because it has allowed us to focus our resources on our most differentiating areas of development.”
Optimum is working with TRLabs under terms of a contract with TRTech, a subsidiary of TRLabs dedicated to technology development for commercial applications.
About Optimum Communications Services, Inc. (www.optimumzone.net)
Optimum is a wholesale network service provider startup with an internally-developed, patent-pending technology-based competitive advantage in providing cost-and-performance optimized MPLS, SDH/SONET and 1/10G Ethernet based backbone network and broadband VPN solutions for end-user-serving communications service providers and multi-sited corporations. Optimum is a member of TRLabs’ Industry Associate network of more than thirty start-up and growth phase high-tech companies doing R&D in western Canada.
About TRLabs
TRLabs creates innovative technologies and trains students to enhance ICT expertise and improve Canada’s global competitiveness. Labs in Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, and Winnipeg employ 250. With 49 partner members representing a unique synergy of industry, government, and university, research focuses on future network needs and demands: data networking, digital media, health, home technologies, network systems, photonics, and wireless communications. In its 19-year existence, TRLabs has trained 810 highly skilled university graduates, created 290 technologies adopted for use by companies, and generated 157 patents issued or filed.
TRTech is a contract research subsidiary of TRLabs dedicated to product development. Industry strikes collaborative agreements with TRLabs to refine a TRLabs research program output or develop new technology, with a specific market application in mind. Favourable IP rights are negotiated. Direct investment in these projects has the potential to be matched by at least 1:1 through external research funding sources. Twenty-five TRTech projects have been completed in the last four years.