Four Winners at the CELTIC Awards in Helsinki
At the Celtic-Plus Event in Helsinki on 24th May 2018, which was co-located with the EUREKA Innovation Days, four projects won the Celtic-Plus award for their outstanding work. Three of these projects were awarded for their excellence in the areas of networking technologies, applications, and multimedia. The fourth was honoured with the Innovation Award for its outstanding market innovation beyond the project lifespan.
The awards were presented to the winners by the Celtic-Plus Vice-Chairs Valerie Blavette from Orange and Riza Durucasugil from NETAS as well as by the representatives of the Public Authorities of the countries where the winning projects have been coordinated: Lars Gustafsson (VINNOVA, Sweden), Hannu Nurmi (Business Finland), Michel Rao (DGE, France), and Tarik Sahin (TUBITAK, Turkey).
Celtic-Plus Innovation Award:
SIGMONA – SDN Concept in Generalized Mobile Network Architectures
Vice Chair Celtic-Plus Jari Lehmusvuori from Nokia Oy (left) and Hannu Nurmi, Business Finland
SIGMONA’s software-defined networking and network function virtualization architecture lowers the initial network investment, energy consumption, and network management costs for mobile operators. SIGMONA’s solution provides network managers the flexibility to configure, manage, secure, and optimize network resources to adapt to changing business needs.
SIGMONA was on the forefront of emerging 5G technology providing operators the facility to adapt 5G technology by themselves without the need to wait for features embedded in vendors’ proprietary and closed software environments.
Project Leader: Nokia Oy, Finland
Duration: 1 June 2013 -30 April 2016
Celtic-Plus Excellence Award for Network Technologies:
GOLD – Gigabits Over the Legacy Drop
GOLD Consortium members (Per Ödling and Pernilla Schuber, Lund University, Les Humphrey, BT) with Lars Gustafsson (right) from Vinnova, Swedish Public Authority
G.fast is the next generation of broadband technology. It delivers fibre-like speeds of multiple gigabit per second over old copper wires and enables solutions which can be up to 70 % lower in price than FTTH. G.fast was developed by 3 Celtic-Plus projects – 4GBB, HFCC and GOLD.
GOLD has achieved outstanding results in re-using copper with bonding, backhauling, remote power feeding, and dynamic time assignment that paves the way towards high speed broadband access. The GOLD project achieved up to multiple-gigabit copper access.
G.fast and XG.fast enable telecom operators to offer hundreds of Mb/s up to Gb/s speeds without the necessity to deploy fibre on the last meters to the home. The very fast development and standardization of the new G.fast and XG.fast standards, to which GOLD made a major contribution, took 5 years in comparison to 13 years required for the VDSL standard. More specifically, GOLD made a major contribution to the ITU-T ETSI and BBF standard and contributed to two thirds of the overall standardization work.
Project Leader: Lund University, Sweden
Duration: January 2015 – December 2017
Celtic-Plus Excellence Award for Services and Applications:
UPSC – Unleash the Power of SIM
UPSC Consortium members (Oguzhan Derici from Cardtek and Project Coordinator Rahmi Cem Cevikbas from Turkcell) with Tarik Şahin from Tubitak, funding Agency Turkey
UPSC provides a solution to tackle serious barriers like the thread of phishing, virus and sniffer attacks to adopt e-services as banking and transactional electronic services to mobile devices.
To enable fast development cycles for e-services, UPSC provides a framework for facilitating the access to the SIM card for application development that unleash the SIM to its full potential. A Speedup of about 10 s has been reached for paying transactions in banks next to overall faster development cycles for e banking services.
Project Coordinator: Turkcell, Turkey
Duration: May 2014 – March 2017
Celtic-Plus Excellence Award for Multimedia:
CONVINcE – Consumption OptimizatioN in VIdeo Networks
CONVINcE consortium (Onur Uluag (Vestel Electronics),Nancy Perrot (Orange),Martti Forsell (VTT),Raoul Monnier (Harmonic)) and Michel Rao from DGE, French Public Authority
CONVINcE addressed the challenge of reducing the power consumption in IP-based video networks with an end-to-end approach, from the headend where contents are encoded and streamed to the terminals where they are consumed, embracing the CDN and the core and access networks.
The project convinced with contributions to four different Standardization forums 3GPP, IEEE, IETF and MPEG, contribution to 6 working groups and 38 technical contributions. Business relevance is highly depending on the cost of energy.
Project Coordinator: Harmonics, France
Duration: September 2014 – September 2017
Celtic-Plus Award Winners 2018
