Alcatel-Lucent opens UK office to research on real-time video delivery

Alcatel-Lucent today said Bell Labs opened a new office in Cambridge, U.K., to conduct research into real-time delivery of video to devices such as smartphones, games consoles, tablets and Smart TVs.

Earlier, Bell Labs opened the Israel Bell Labs cloud research facility in May.

Alcatel-Lucent will announce its third location later this year.

The objective of this kind of small offices is to ensure start-up like environment to allow researchers to engage with Alcatel-Lucent’s businesses, other Bell Labs researchers and external stakeholders such as enterprises, universities and other research organizations.

Research at the Cambridge location will center upon the evolution of video and real time cloud content delivery. Video currently accounts for approximately 75 percent of a mobile service provider’s network traffic.

The Bell Labs team will be co-located with the headquarters of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Video business, which has grown following the acquisition of Cambridge based Velocix in 2009.

Bo Olofsson, who was the director for the product research group at British Sky Broadcasting, will head the new research initiative.