Industry partnership: NBN Co

First-of-its-kind collaboration

ASTRID is not a traditional research partnership. Rather than defining a specific R&D outcome, the collaboration takes an overarching program approach.

This allows nbn and UTS to collaboratively identify the most pressing challenges to tackle and the most promising initiatives to pursue.

“Many universities will focus on a particular technology or discipline – signal processing, AI or neural networks, as an example,” says Industry Professor Ray Owen, UTS Telecommunication Research Unit. “This is different. This is a sector-based approach, working across all these areas to develop solutions that are meaningful to the Australian telecommunications industry.” 

Industry Professor Owen leads the university’s Telecommunications Research Unit – a new facility established to support the program. This is where academics, students and industry come together to tackle challenges facing the nbn and the wider telecommunications sector.

According to Owen, the partnership brings the whole capability of the university – facilities, research, teaching and learning, graduate intake – to benefit industry partners like nbn.

UTS’s Vice-Chancellor and President, Andrew Parfitt, agrees.

Solving the big challenges through an integrated program of projects 

By taking a program approach, ASTRID provides a framework for managing research projects across three core streams: innovation, insights and technology.

Within these streams, the program team and nbn collaboratively identify projects.

This has been immensely successful to date, with nine active projects at the end of the first year – triple the number required by the partnership agreement in year 1.

“We can innovate because we’ve got this timeframe of five years to come up with new ideas and work collaboratively with nbn,” says Professor Ray Owen.

These projects address a range of sector challenges, from network latency in gaming to using sonic pulses to detect pipe blockages to improving the accuracy of physical asset inventory with graph neural networks. 

While the program team undertakes the majority of the research, nbn staff help steer the projects and interpret the research findings. This is a cost-effective approach, providing nbn with the capacity to pursue exploratory research without straining internal resources.

The UTS academics working on these projects also hold occasional lunch ‘n’ learn sessions for nbn staff. These conversational sessions share the latest research on topics such as network failures, graph neural networks and the impact of generative AI on telcos. Not only do they contribute to the continuous education of nbn as an organisation, but these sessions have also generated a number of project ideas for the program.

In all of this, communication is key. The ASTRID team produces a quarterly newsletter for nbn’s 6,000 employees, keeping the organisation up-to-date on the program and key breakthroughs.

“ASTRID establishes a new way of doing research,” says Owen.

The research outputs and intellectual property are owned by nbn, while UTS’s researchers and PhD students gain certainty from the program approach. 

This means the partnership can create impact beyond the scope of individual projects, enabling the university to build its capability in this critical area.

Promoting women

One of the key outcomes nbn wants to achieve through the partnership is an increase in the number of women represented in the talent pipeline.

To drive this, the program worked with the university’s Women in Engineering and IT team and internal networks to attract female interns.

Together they developed and promoted an advertising campaign focused on female engineers. 

Titled “Build it! Make it! Track it!”, the campaign generated significant interest, promptly filling the five initial internships.

Today, most of the undergraduate interns on the program are women.

“Domestic students within the internship program come out with essential research, engineering and practical skillsets on the nbn network,” says Professor Owen. “They get to do internships on real projects, with real data, for the industry, in a dedicated space without needing to leave the faculty.”

Professor Owen says this kind of domestic skilling is crucial for the broad capability for the telecommunications industry.

At the end of the first year, nbn has already recruited an UTS undergrad on the back of their internship in the program.  

Key contributions were also made by:

• Maryam Asgari, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT)
• Yara Fakoua, UTS Robotics Institute