About the Broadband Institute
In "Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits," the definitive report on the subject of broadband to the home, the National Academies Press defined broadband as a multidimensional capability, encompassing communications and computing, physical channels and networks, and technologies and applications - not to mention economics and policy. The report also emphasized the importance of cross-disciplinary academic research on the topic, as an integral component of progressing towards the ideal of pervasive broadband - a capability that would take us from universal telephony to ubiquitous and spontaneous multimedia.
The Georgia Tech Broadband Institute has supported this vision since the late nineties, bringing together the best minds in academia and industry to define significant research problems in broadband technologies and services, and to solve them in a vertically integrated fashion: from science to prototyping.
The total pool of academic expertise available to the Institute is significant. Together, Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and its College of Computing currently support 187 faculty, 1,364 graduate and 2,802 undergraduate students. The combined research expenditures of these organizations is nearly $65 million.
The Broadband Institute is a research center within the broader umbrella of the Georgia Centers for Advanced Telecommunications Technology , and as such, it works closely with several complementary GCATT centers , often providing an entrée to other centers for its industrial partners.
Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and Broadband Institute Director Prof. Nikil Jayant founded the Institute in 1999 after nearly thirty years with Bell Labs. While there, he and his team were responsible for scores of groundbreaking inventions that have paved the way for today's broadband services, particularly compression technologies that have gone on to define cellular telephony, voice over IP, MP3, satellite CD-radio and HDTV.
The Georgia Research Alliance contributes by seeding significant research infrastructure ranging from such technology-centric examples as the Software Radio and Last Mile laboratories, to such application- and human-centric resources as the Residential Laboratory and the Aware Home Research Initiative. Impact has been demonstrated in all university metrics, among them papers, books and awards, as well as by invited leadership in such state and national initiatives as Yamacraw and the National Academies study on broadband policy.
The focus of the Institute has evolved with time. It started with a cable-centric program, but has gone on to embrace a more complete view of the so-called last mile, characterized by the bandwidth promise of fiber extensions and the mobility attributes of wireless. As signified in its tag line PLATINUM (Physical Layer Access Technologies, Integrated Networks and Ubiquitous Multimedia), the Institute has maintained a comprehensive scope while striving for increased relevance and selective depth. Thus, as the Institute continues to look at the ever-changing challenges of the last mile (broadly defined to include wired and wireless, uplink and downlink), emphasis has shifted from traditional broadband speed topics such as gigabit wireless and gigabit optical per user in the home, to newer challenges such as wired-wireless convergence, co-existence of multiple wireless systems including ultrawideband, communication problems such as cognitive radio, sensor networks and security for handhelds, and such application domains as cooperative content distribution networks, mobile gaming and such context-aware applications as aging in place.