May / June 2005
ONTARIO R&E SUMMIT PARTNER PROFILE
For Bell Canada - catalyst for research and education - the future is over IP
What will our next generation mobile communication device look like? What will these new and wonderful futuristic services or applications allow us to do?
Chances are that Bell Canada-funded researchers have a pretty good idea.
The devices and services we will all eventually take for granted are being researched today, in the labs and projects in universities and research institutions funded by Bell Canada throughout the country - products and services virtually all designed to function over advanced networks and Internet Protocol (IP) technology.
One of Canada's largest private sector contributors to public research funding, Bell Canada is the dominant telecommunications player when it comes to providing support and services to Canadian research and education institutions, working with 60 colleges, 30 universities, several ministries and educational organizations and as many as 100 school boards.
In 2003 alone, Bell invested $5.2 million in youth and education and as much as $5.4 million in university innovation, with funding and expertise supporting projects ranging from The Learning Partnership to the Virtual Science Fair.
Closer to home, Bell Canada led the public-private sector consortium that partnered with the Optical Regional Advanced Network of Ontario to build the globally-leading ORION network.
As a result of this partnership, ORION now connects every university, most colleges and several teaching hospitals and school boards in Ontario together over a sophisticated networking infrastructure, in a project that leveraged public and private sector resources to create a 4,300 km optical infrastructure completely dedicated to research and education in Ontario, with a total value exceeding $75 million.
For the advanced R&E community, however, one of Bell's most critical contributions is through its Bell University Labs (BUL) initiative, which supports 16 university Research Chairs, over 50 research projects and nine target research labs across Canada.
The BUL initiative contributes to the development of communications technologies in Canada and provides the biggest market test lab in the country, bringing together researchers across a broad range of disciplines and combining the research capacity of universities with extensive knowledge bases in the communications sector in the Bell Canada companies.
At the centre of research are the working laboratories themselves, such as BUL facilities at the University of Toronto, which serves as a focal point for collaboration and multidisciplinary research.
Among the current research projects is The Collaborative Effectiveness Lab - an Internet-enabled forum and workspace for collaboration within a multidisciplinary team of researchers, looking at computer-supported cooperative work, virtual communities and human-computer interaction.
That's just one of nearly 30 such research projects currently underway at the UofT's BUL program. More are being funded at other universities and research institutes across the country.
Bell Canada itself has had to adapt to the changes that have transformed the world of telecommunications, largely because of the Internet and the need to achieve efficiencies and cost-savings through new technology.
One of the individuals responsible for helping Bell keep at the cutting edge of innovation is its VP of Technology, Carl Condon, a keynote speaker at the Ontario R&E Summit June 13-14. Responsible for Bell Canada's "wireline" technology portfolio, he leads Bell's VoIP, MPLS, access and video initiatives, a significant growth area for Bell Canada and other service providers.
The introduction of IP telephony - technology that integrates voice, video and data into a single network - has revolutionised the way research and education institutions communicate within their walls and to the outside world.
It has introduced more efficient sharing of data among faculty, students and administrators as they move between classes, collaborate through virtual work groups and create and share multimedia resources.
For example, Bell Canada and Nortel Networks recently partnered to deliver IP telephone services and VoIP to Sudbury's Laurentian University.
One of the first and largest VoIP installations in North America, it is providing an integrated network that provides IP telephone, unified messaging, text-to-speech applications and multimedia classrooms.
An immediate cost benefit for network administrators is having a single network for both data and voice. Integrating email, voice and fax and enabling IP applications has the potential to improve productivity for university faculty and staff.
As Bell and other telecommunication companies adapt to meet the evolving needs of its research and education customers, new opportunities for collaboration and innovation are emerging, promising to forever change the way we all work, learn and conduct research.
Bell Canada supports the Ontario R&E Summit as Platinum Sponsor. Carl Condon's June 14 morning keynote starts at 8:45 am at the Summit, held at the Courtyard Marriott Downtown Toronto.
Bell Canada maintains a comprehensive database of all its funded projects and research chairs. Learn more about these and Bell Canada's contribution to research and education at www.bul.utoronto.ca and www.bce.ca/en/community/innovation.
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