HUMBER AWARDED $3 MILLION IN GRANT TO RESEARCH NEXT GENERATION BROADCAST TECHNOLOGY ATSC 3.0

Posted on July 8, 2021 in ATSC News

Humber College of Toronto will establish the first ATSC 3.0 Living Lab in Canada at its North Campus with help from $2 million in grant funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and $1 million funding from Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). Humber is contributing $500,000 to the project.

The B²C Lab will be the first R&D test bed in North America (and at this point only one of two in the world) equipped with both an ATSC 3.0 broadcast ecosystem and 5G core network.

The core mission of the B²C Lab is to position Humber College as a leader in ATSC 3.0 technology research, development, testing and deployment, supporting the creation of services and solutions for industry. The lab will explore both television and non-television applications including converged, hybrid 3.0/5G architectures that can foster the development of a true heterogenous data delivery network incorporating the best of standards technologies.

The grant funding will allow Humber to also:

• Provide four industry workshops per year for each of the five years;
• Embed curriculum related to ATSC 3.0 in each of its Faculties;
• Employ more than 150 students from across various programs over the five-year grant award;
• Foster partnerships with the private sector to test their use-cases for ATSC 3.0, leading to business and community innovation at the local, regional and national levels.

“With 27,000 full time and 56,000 part time students, Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning is a tremendous location for an ATSC 3.0 Living Lab,” said Madeleine Noland, ATSC president. “One of Humber’s hallmarks is to forge strong relationships with major industry partners, and the new lab will be no exception. With tremendous support from the Canadian authorities as demonstrated by the successful grant proposals, together with a the commitment of the College and Canadian industry partners, I look forward to the amazing innovations that are sure to come from this project.”

Among the myriad partners involved in the new B²C Lab is ATSC member, Communications Research Centre in Ottawa (CRC). Planned joint research with CRC will include inter-tower communications currently being developed in IT-5, ATSC’s newest Implementation Team, development of ATSC 3.0 broadcast Single Frequency Network technology, creation of a broadcast core network being documented in ATSC TG3/S43, and convergence with a 5G core network implementation.

Posted in ATSC News