Winners are WINNER+, 100GET and RUBENS

As every year the Celtic Core Group selected the three most successful and most promising Celtic projects for the Celtic Excellence Award. This year there were so many excellent projects that it was enormously difficult to select the three best of them. In particular two of them were so strong and excellent that both projects received the Gold Award: WINNER+ and 100GET. RUBENS, as the third project, received the Bronze Award.

Celtic Award winners 2010: the project representatives of WINNER+; 100GET, and RUBENS together with José Jimenez, Chairman of Celtic-Plus (left), and Heinz Brüggemann, Director of the Celtic Office (right)

Celtic Gold Award winners

WINNER+

WINNER+ started its activities already as EU-FP6 project and continued and finalised its work as Celtic project in 2010. 27 organisations from 9 countries participated in this 13 million euro project.
The project was led by Werner Mohr, Nokia Siemens Networks, Germany. It had a strong international impact in shaping the technology choices and standards for the fourth generation (4G) wireless communication technologies. The project made 59 important contributions to the standardisation bodies ITU, 3GPP, and ECC, thus paving the way to future roll-out of LTE-Advanced (Release 10). In addition, the project was elected as one of the external evaluation group in the ITU-R that is elaborating IMT-Advanced.

There is a huge market potential for this new 4G mobile technology which will further strengthen the strong position of the European industry in this area.

100GET

100GET, actually should be more considered as a cluster project, as it was composed of 6 separate but linked sub-projects, each in the size of a rather big Celtic project:
■ 100GET-AL
■ 100GET-E3
■ 100GET-ER
■ 100GET-es
■ 100GET-METRO
■ 100GET-Horizontal
In the 100GET project 40 organizations from 5 countries participated between October 2007 and December 2010. This 65 million euro project was coordinated by Kurt Loesch from Alcatel-Lucent, Germany, Thomas Michaelis and Rainer Derksen from Nokia Siemens Networks, Germany.

The project was focusing on the development of 100 Gbps Ethernet based carrier-grade transport networks (“Ethernet across the entire network”). The project has done impressive work that was worth the investment and performed world class research, especially in the area of optical layers where a number of new devices have been developed. Furthermore, the results in the area of networking have been very promising, as they cover a broad field in optical communications. Attention was given to different important aspects including multilayer planning, advanced switching and routing, and techno-economic evaluation.

The project generated 21 new products, improved another 15 products, filed 56 patents, contributed to 32 standards, and performed 53 pilots to mention only the most important achievements.

Celtic Bronze Award winner

RUBENS

The RUBENS project was active between February 2008 and January 2010. 9 organizations from 6 countries participated in this 6 million euro project. The project coordinator was Steven van den Berghe from Alcatel-Lucent in Belgium.

RUBENS worked on a technology that allows a better use of the installed bandwidth and goes one step further towards smarter networks that offer an increased Quality of Experience (QoE). The Rubens solution was shown to the Board of Directors of some of the partner organisations and quite substantial follow-up activities have been decided in most of the participating companies.

In addition, the project generated a significant number of standards contributions.