Clean tech and renewable energy fund ESB Novusmodus has taken a €3m stake in promising Irish fibre communications company Intune Networks, illustrating the link between state-of-the-art broadband and reducing energy consumption.
The investment adds to Intune’s recent €22m funding round, which will be used to complete the development and commercialisation of its high performance optical data switch technology.
Novusmodus’ John McKiernan – appointed as a director of Intune Networks – said that Intune Networks’ revolutionary technology has the potential to transform the way carriers operate their metro networks, solving bandwidth problems at the same time as halving their energy consumption.
“We are delighted to be backing such an excellent management team and a company founded by Irish engineers with enormous global prospects.”
Intune’s patented fast tuneable laser technology solves the costly performance bottleneck problems facing all major mobile telecoms carriers as existing network architectures struggle to deal with huge increases in data traffic.
Mobile traffic is forecast to grow by a factor of 10 in less than five years, with video consuming more than 50pc of new bandwidth.
The problem is exacerbated by the recent proliferation of high powered mobile devices, such as smartphones and netbooks, which produce increasingly unpredictable data traffic patterns.
Intune’s technology uses high-speed laser tuning technology to colour code address locations, greatly reducing the processing requirement.
The technology doubles performance at half of the cost and halves the power consumption. Intune’s breakthrough solution also increases the potential utilisation of existing metro fibre networks from below 10pc to above 80pc.
Intune is currently building the platform for the Irish Government’s recently announced €5m Exemplar Network, which is an open test bed site for companies to trial high-speed network applications.
“Major telecommunications carriers all over the world face increasing stresses on their networks as the uptake of high-powered mobile devices continues to drive mobile traffic,” said Intune Networks CEO Tim Fritzley.
“Our product solves this problem without the installation of additional fibre optics, and is both cost-efficient and less energy intensive,” said Fritzley.
