The New Communicator for Communications

Communications have changed more in the last two years than they have in the last 20 combined.

The advent of broadband communications has wiped out entire product lines for Kenton and many other telecommunications companies. “It’s a huge revolution – it is really here with us, and it is only going to grow. We’ve had to start from a clean sheet of paper,” said Michael Biggs, Managing Director of Kenton Research.

Crayford based Kenton Research provides telecommunications hardware and software to big name consumers like BT and the BBC. Kenton is now working to stay ahead in this revolution with the help of KTP Associate Tony Sheppard, who is working to create a HD Communicator (HDC), a new telecommunications product that they hope will carry Kenton through this period of massive change. “The HDC will replace some of the dying products. If we start shipping next year, we expect it to account for 4-5% of turnover in its first year. Then there are derivatives of it. We hope to make a family of products that have the same software core, but have different facilities on them,” commented Michael. HDC will allow communications over broadband networks for a variety of industries. “We’ve got a box that can do a lot of different things; there are a huge amount of applications for it. It could be used for petrochemical pipelines, the rail industry, roads, or power generation substations, it is almost endless.”

Tony and the team at Kenton are well on their way to making HDC commercially available by early next year. “We’ve passed two significant mile stones in getting the hardware running and getting the main operating systems. We can actually talk to it, it has significant intelligence.”

One of the first applications of HDC will be in the rail industry, to help create rail communications via broadband. “It can be used for switch relays for signaling on railways. At the moment, the system the information travels on is over 50 years old,” said Tony. Road networks are also interested in the product for use in their surveillance camera technology. Tony feels this project will not only benefit Kenton through the advent of a new sophisticated product, but will also benefit his personal career development. He said his KTP project has helped improve his business skills. “I found the presentations we worked on really useful, it is something I had never been involved in before. Through the KTP modules I learned to be more disciplined, it has certainly been an education,” reports Tony. Through Tony’s work, the KTP programme is set to have a major impact at Kenton Research and its 25 employees. “It is certainly beneficial to the company and it puts us in a good position with a new product,” said Michael.

Dr Perry Xiao, LSBU academic working on this KTP, said the project is going very well. “It is a very specialised area, and this project gives us an idea how the industry is working in particular areas. It gives us information on the market demand, so that we are aware of what the market needs – we feed the information back to the students - this is a real knowledge transfer.”