Celtic-Plus Innovation and Excellence Awards 2014 (Monaco)

Every year Celtic-Plus selects the three best projects for the Celtic-Plus Excellence Award and the most successful project, with regards to innovation and impact results for the Celtic-Plus Innovation Award. see press release

The following projects received the Celtic-Plus Awards in Monaco:

4GBB, the Innovation Award winner 2014

The Celtic Innovation Award, which has been given out for the third time, was handed over to 4GBB, a highly successful project, which generated a significant amount of impact and innovation.
The 4GBB project developed a new generation of broadband access systems delivering up to 1 Gb/s.
The system is a hybrid fibre-copper system where optical fibre is deployed to near the homes and existing copper wiring is used for the last say 20-250 meters. The project successfully aimed at initiating and driving a new standard which is called G.fast. The project delivered a very valuable input to the Commission’s “Digital Agenda for Europe” for assuring high-speed Internet connectivity to Europe’s society. The project will continue with the definition the deployment of the G.Fast standard with the project HFCC-G.Fast.
The project was led by Per Ola Börjesson, Ericsson and Pernilla Schuber, Lund University, Sweden.
The project budget was roughly 8 M€
In addition to the Innovation Award Celtic-Plus honours the three most successful, recently finished projects with the Celtic-Plus Excellence Award.

EO-Net received the Celtic-Plus Gold Award

The EO-Net project brings “elasticity” to optical transport networks, so that its ability to adapt data rates and allocated bandwidths of each optical signal according to both the traffic demand and the amount of physical degradation of the network.
This project is really an innovative project targeting a disruptive technology. The partners of this consortium were among the first looking into this topic of elastic optical networks. This new concept of elasticity in optical networks could become an enabler to achieve Energy efficiency which is an important topic for next generation NWs.
The business relevance is high, 8 prototypes have been realized and there were already 9 product improvements using results of the project. The project was led by Patricia Layec, Alcatel-Lucent, France. The project budget was 5.2 M€

HIPERMED was handed over the Silver Award

The Hipermed project realized a High Performance Telemedicine Platform based on a unified Service Oriented Architecture providing media over IP using SIP-based control plane services and network services over the Internet.
The Business relevance is considered to be very high and the project realized 12 new and improved products. The return on investment of the project has been estimated to 100. In several countries a large amount of commercial users and many clinics have become interested to adopt the HIPERMED system. The project was led by Oscar Chabrera, Merkum, Spain. The project budget was about 6.3 M€

ENGINES received the Bronze Award

The project focused on the support and development of the Digital Video Broadcasting-Next Generation Handheld (DVB-NGH) and DVB-T2 standard. This standard has been adopted or deployed in more than 140 countries. DVB-T2 has been adopted in 32 and deployed in 24 other countries mainly from Asia and Africa.
The Business relevance is considered high. In some regions the commercial perspectives are very good, like in Russia, India and in Africa. In total the project partners have realized 13 new and 8 improved products that are sold on the DVB market. The project was led by Jani Väre, Teleste, Finland. The project budget was around 13.3 M€