Australian technology expands telecom capacity
A spinoff company from Australia's Co-operative Research Centres (CRCs) has signed an historic export deal potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
RBN, a firm incubated by the Australian Photonics CRC, has signed a 5-year agreement with Marconi to resell Australian-developed CWDM technology for expanding the capacity of communications networks.
The deal means RBN has secured partners for its coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) technology in Europe, America and Asia, while retaining the intellectual property for Australia.
“The overall world network market has been flat for a couple of years but our segment is one area that is showing strong growth,” says Dr Richard Lauder, a co-founder of the company. “Today the game is all about getting greater capacity out of existing networks at a lower cost, rather than putting in new networks. That’s exactly what CWDM does - it complements existing technology.”
According to Dr Lauder, the world market for coarse wavelength technology was US$100 million ($135 million) in 2003, is estimated to double this year, and double again by 2006.
RBN was founded by Dr Lauder, a Photonics CRC researcher from the University of Melbourne, and Ross Halgren, who led the Sydney node of the CRC’s networking vehicle, Redcentre PL. The fledgling company was nurtured in the Photonics CRC with help from the Commonwealth Government’s Technology Diffusion Program.
Lauder and Halgren pooled their ideas to develop a new product which addressed a key gap in the metropolitan communications network market. The company’s administrative headquarters are now in California while its research centre remains based in Sydney where it employs 70 staff.
5-May-2004