On June 1st, Altice Labs celebrated 7 years of “exporting innovation made in Portugal”. On this day, under the motto “looking into the future”, there was room for several technological demonstrations.
Fulfilling what is already a tradition, the anniversary of Altice Labs was marked by the moment when the veil was lifted on some of the innovation projects. Hundreds of guests had the opportunity to attend first-hand demonstrations of technologies being worked on in Aveiro:
Ultrabroadband: A real demonstration of the 25G-PON technology connected to the public network was carried out in Portugal. “For businesses, having speeds of 25 Gbps, in addition to the current 10 Gbps, is a fairly significant change, but for home, the consumer may wonder if they need these speeds. At this moment, they most likely don’t need these speeds.”, said the General Manager, Alcino Lavrador, in the protocol ceremony. However, in health this speed is significantly important. “Hospitals with these speeds will be able to perform remote examinations or surgical interventions with the highest connection accuracy. In addition, the fiber optic network is the backbone of 5G networks today and will be 6G tomorrow so we will undoubtedly need not only the technology that guarantees this but also higher speeds,” he added.
Applications of Industrial 5G Private Networks: It was possible to watch the interaction of a drone with an autonomous land transport vehicle, simulating the delivery of critical equipment in an industrial environment. During the demonstration, the result of a partnership with Youship and BeyondVision, both vehicles transmitted video, in real time, through Altice Labs’ 5G Private Network solution, while it was possible to control them with communications supported in 5G.
Virtual Reality in the Teaching of Medicine: In this demonstration, in partnership with the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, an emerging technology that is being implemented in the pre-graduate medical education of that Faculty was used. In practice, this is a new way of teaching future doctors, putting them in a simulated/ immersive scenario, through the use of virtual reality glasses, before being called for procedures or surgical interventions in real patients.
Artificial Intelligence at the service of companies: Altice Labs presented the evolution of the platform “Low Code” BotSchool with the goal of revolutionizing the channel of communication with customers, partners and employees of companies, providing them with an easy-to-integrate platform that uses the most advanced Artificial Intelligence mechanisms to provide means of interaction in natural language about information to the public or internally. Another aspect of evolution is the ability to automatically remove information from interactions/ conversations with the customer or employee, allowing to base business decisions and improve the experience. A practical example of this capability is call analysis reports that allow you to extract information from Quality Control automatically. This evolution is the starting point for creating next-generation communication journeys centered on intelligence, automation, and customer experience.
Satellite Communications: What Altice Labs proposes to do is to develop a technology that consists of having a kind of 5G/6G terminal in the nanosatellite and that, in turn, will communicate with a cellular network base station, thus entering the terrestrial network. This solution presents Altice Labs as a future supplier of bidirectional telecommunications systems between space and earth. The laboratory is forming a consortium with the Instituto Superior Técnico and the University of Luxembourg to jointly apply for the project to the European Space Agency. The ambition of this alliance is also the development of a nanosatellite that will be an evolution of ISTSat-1, developed by IST, to be launched in space. This nanosatellite was on display.
Exploring Data: In the field of data processing from multiple sources or sensors, it was revealed how the technology developed by Altice Labs promises to revolutionize life in cities and agriculture. Live! Urban facilitates the analysis of decision-makers responsible for managing and improving the quality of life of the inhabitants of a city. In the domain of Agrotech, Live! Green starts from an identical principle: gather and process statistical data in order to enhance better decision making. In this demonstration, it was possible to see the practical application of the platform in the fields of Madeira banana and grape production for wine production.
This event brought together Alcino Lavrador, General Manager of Altice Labs; Ana Figueiredo, CEO of Altice Portugal; Alexandre Fonseca, Co-CEO of Altice Group; José Ribau Esteves, Mayor of Aveiro; Fernando Araújo, President of the Portuguese National Health System, and Lloyd Felton, CEO of the British operator and client of Altice Labs, County Broadband.