Location
BT's main research facility is located at Adastral Park, near Ipswich in Suffolk, England. The Adastral Park site was first planned around 1968 as the Martlesham Heath Post Office Laboratories and after completion in 1971 it has grown to a facility which today has around 4,000 research and development people from both BT and some of its partner companies. Globally, BT has additional research labs in Beijing, Boston MA and Abu Dhabi. The focus of research at BT is information and communications technology.
The Royal Air Force were the original residents of the site in Suffolk at RAF Martlesham Heath. Experimental aircraft test flights flew from the airfield and the name (Adastral Park) is intended to reflect the history of experimentation and innovation, which is the continuing focus for the Park. The initial models and plans created by the Ministry of Public Building and Works (the successor to the Ministry of Works) would appear to indicate the influence of the Thunderbirds TV series of the 1960s.
Academic research partners
BT works closely with both academics and students in over 20 institutions globally and has strong partnerships with the University of Cambridge in the UK, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US and Tsinghua University in China. BT also leads the India-UK Advanced Technology Centre, a consortium of 22 Indian and UK industry and academic partners conducting research into current and next generation fixed and wireless communications.
Innovations from BT Research
1979 – GPO launched Prestel, the world's first viewdata network.
Read the full text
1982 – Europe's first satellite transmission service was launched with Adastral Park's satellite dishes beaming television signals to the Orbital Test Satellite, run by Eutelsat, allowing Finnish and Norwegian viewers to receive the (English language) signals.
1987 – the world's first instantaneous translation of speech by computer was unveiled by BT's research laboratories.
1995 – BT research designed and developed a video on demand service, which was trialled in the local area [Ipswich – Colchester], with 2,500 customers. It used asymmetric data on a subscriber's line (asymmetric digital subscriber line) over copper cables, with a decoder supplied by Apple. – article on trial
1999 – BT announced that it had pushed commercial optical fibre transmission to 80 Gbit/s. BT labs demonstrated the world's fastest regenerator – a photonic digital network component.
2002 – Research and development teams designed and deployed a suite of new business systems allowing the launch of the UK's first commercial broadband internet access service.
2006 – BT implemented the world's first fully automated 'spam buster' system to track down and tackle professional spammers and 'botnet' infected customers on the BT broadband network.
