Professor Rod Tucker from the University of Melbourne’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering says to team up with Bell Labs, world renowned for its ability to generate breakthrough innovations, is an exciting step for the University.

“It adds significant expertise to our strong track record of research into energy efficient telecommunications,” he says.

The centre will conduct research on a broad range of telecommunications network infrastructure elements, and will focus on how these elements can be made more energy efficient. CEET will draw on Bell Labs’ decades of achieving breakthrough innovations and its extensive experience in managing collaborative research projects as well as on the University’s own world-class research in telecommunications network infrastructure.
 
Both the University of Melbourne and Bell Labs are members of the GreenTouch™ initiative, a global, industry-wide consortium formed to improve energy efficiency by driving a radical redesign of communications networks.  Accordingly, the research activities undertaken by the centre will be used to further the GreenTouch initiative and its objectives.

Victorian State Treasurer John Lenders says what makes CEET so valuable is both the step it takes toward green telecommunications objectives and the research opportunities it provides for Australia.

 “It will enable the Victorian State to position itself as a place for information and communications technology research and a centre for green communications research, development and training.”

Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen says finding ways to reduce energy consumption is a challenge that our society faces and that our industry is well positioned to address.

“CEET is an example of an initiative that has the potential to play a decisive role in meeting this challenge because it has the key ingredients for success: partners with deep research experience and complementary goals,” he says.