NICTA inks commercial license agreement for ground-breaking performance monitoring technology
Australia’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research Centre of Excellence, NICTA, has signed a commercial license agreement with Optium (NASDAQ: OPTM), a leading supplier of high-performance optical subsystems, covering groundbreaking optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) monitoring technology.
This is the first technology licence agreement exploiting research in the Managing and Monitoring the Internet (MAMI) project, which is based at NICTA’s Victoria Research Laboratory.
NICTA’s new generation optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) monitoring technology is compatible with optical switches, including reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs), and can distinguish and measure the impairment caused by optical amplifier noise, improving the ability to manage telecommunications networks.
"We are delighted to enter into this agreement with Optium,” NICTA Chief Executive Officer, Dr David Skellern said. "The licensed technology is the product of a number of years of work by an outstanding research team and represents the first of a number of related new technologies due to be released by NICTA over the next twelve months.”
”We are excited to have exclusive rights for the use of NICTA’s breakthrough OSNR technology in our WSS ROADM,” Optium Australia, Vice President and General Manager, Dr Simon Poole said.
“The advanced features of NICTA’s digital signal processing technology, including its capability for 40 Gbit/sec systems across different modulation schemes on both 50 and 100GHz channel spacing, will continue to differentiate Optium’s WSS ROADM product line,” he said. “The embedded technology will provide customers with a true measure of the noise within the transmission bandwidth, enabling network-wide awareness and improving the management of high-speed optical networks.”
“This technology operates in-band providing live information on actual performance and is faster and less complex than similar devices,” NICTA Principal Researcher and MAMI Project Leader Mr Trevor Anderson said.
“These advantages enable network-wide awareness and significantly improves an operator’s ability to manage high-speed optical networks,” Mr Anderson said.
"The information provided by the monitor will provide additional confidence in the robustness of new high-speed networks supporting highly efficient network designs.”
"This is the beginning of what we expect to be a long-term relationship with Optium as a partner in the development and commercialisation of optical networking technologies coming out of NICTA,” NICTA Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Mr David Wright said.
Document(s): 
NICTA inks commercial license with Optium (pdf, 26KB)
Contact: Kelly Mills
Phone: +61 2 8374 5489
Email: kelly.mills@nicta.com.au
