|
Intune Technologies, an Irish company which develops tunable laser products for the telecommunications industry, has secured IEP2.25 million in an initial round of funding.
The seed capital investment was led by European venture capital company 3i, with further funding from ICC Venture Capital and private investors.
Intune's hardware and software products combined enable the manufacture and use of tunable laser transmitters by building an intelligent system around the laser itself.
The technology allows the splitting of the laser into different colours, much like a spectrum, giving a number of channels down which to send data, or communicate, rather than the single channel a laser normally offers. This means a company which uses 80 lasers to send different colours down a fibre optic cable can now do it with a single tunable laser which will switch between different colours or channels.
"This initial investment is an endorsement of Intune's technology and aggressive expansion plans. It will allow us to develop our product research, distribution operations and customer support and will enable us to recruit more staff to support our growth strategy," said John Dunne, Chief Executive Officer of Intune technologies.
Dunne said that the Intune system, when fully developed, will allow a network to be totally reconfigured from a single computer, rather than the complex switching which is needed now to do so. He also said that, following prototype testing, Intune had received positive feedback from its customers.
Research from Ryan Hankin Kent shows that the market for tunable lasers will grow from USD2 million last year to around USD280 million in 2001, and predicts the market will expand to over USD960 million.
Ninety-five percent of the biggest costs of increasing the capacity of telecommunications networks is involved in the physical laying of cables in the ground. Intune says its technology alleviates the need for new optical fibre networks by increasing the channels within each laser which is used to send data down fibre optic cables.
Telecommuncations operators have to cope with often rapidly changing demand between, for example, day and night with business parks having a large amount of activity during the day but practically none at night. Through the tuning of the laser, Intune's hardware and software allows operators to shift, quickly and easily, capacity across networks by simply switching between the various channels in each laser.
Intune said the company's technology has the capability to replace existing laser hardware, of which around one million units were sold last year. Intune claims that the progression which tunable laser transmitters bring will be similar to the current changes in mobile networks from circuit switched to packet switched (GPRS).
Intune Technologies was established in Dublin, Ireland, in 1999 by co-founders John Dunne and Tom Farrell. The company plans to increase staff numbers to 25 over the next three months.
|
