Victoria has again topped other states in positioning itself as the centre of the country’s broadband future, this time playing host to a tie-up between Huawei and RMIT University that will see up to 500 Australians trained in networking technologies over the next three years.
The Chinese networking and telecommunications vendor said it will also seek to train an additional 1500 students in technologies such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) through agreements with other Australian universities.
RMIT classrooms will be equipped with Huawei equipment with the vendor also providing staff to assist with training.
In a statement, Victoria’s minister for information and communication technology, John Lenders, said the announcement was the first of many expected to hit the headlines after the state secured the network operations centre (NOC) for the company responsible for rolling out the National Broadband Network (NBN), NBN Co.
Digital post-production company, Cutting Edge, also recently announced a move to Melbourne, providing a further 65 jobs to the state's IT market.
“Huawei has chosen Victoria as its training base and RMIT University as its lead university to drive its entry into the next generation broadband market, training 1000 students nationally – including 500 in Victoria – over the next three years,” Lenders said.
“The new centre will be a joint effort between RMIT and Huawei and will also serve as Huawei’s regional training centre for staff and customers.
“A major part of the centre’s function will be training people across the ICT industry on next-generation technology, with a particular focus on products and hardware for the NBN.”
In recent times Melbourne has witnessed new offices being opened by VMware and a $78 million facility by CSC.
Those announcements followed on from other significant investments in the state by high-profile ICT companies. These include: NBN Co’s engineering headquarters; Wipro, which unveiled a development centre in Melbourne to provide consulting, software development, testing and business process services; and Bell Labs at the University of Melbourne with a new telco research centre.
The Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET), a partnership initiative with Alcatel-Lucent's research arm, is the second significant research body to be formed at the University of Melbourne in recent times, with the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES) also being partly funded by the state government.
IBES partners with many of the leading networking and telecommunications companies to explore the impacts of fast broadband, such as the NBN.