American research has long been the engine for the growth of our nation’s gross domestic product.

The YAS Research arm is 40 years old and continues its mission through the University of New Hampshire’s Broadband Center of Excellence (BCOE). This organization is an interdisciplinary academy designed to establish UNH as a global leader in maximizing the effectiveness of broadband technologies on commerce, innovation, competitiveness, and quality of life.

Prior to its association with UNH, the YAS Foundation developed a Broadband Knowledge Center (YBKC) to conduct broadband research.

That center has served as the platform on which the YAS Foundation and the university established BCOE. Dr. Rouzbeh Yassini (father of the cable modem) has guided BCOE to leverage UNH research, technology, outreach, and education to pursue universally available broadband that would also be affordable for the 3.6 billion people who are now lacking adequate broadband service.

Yassini, with a team of researchers, professors, and broadband pioneers put all his effort to extend broadband to unserved and under-served communities, promotes UNH as a fully broadband-enabled university and home to the UNH Interoperability Laboratory, a world-recognized independent networking and data communications testing facility and to show how an entire city or state can use broadband services and improve the quality of life. His lifetime dream is that all the people in the world are connected to the broadband 24×7 no matter where they are located.

UNH BCOE continues the focus of YBKC in researching initiatives to enable broadband to serve as a platform to create economic growth, societal improvements and business success. To achieve this pursuit, BCOE has pursued ways to make broadband affordable and universal.  Specifically, BCOE has focused on the following core elements:

• Enable low-cost broadband services globally and gigabit services to all schools,
• Empower communities with the benefits of broadband services for the economy,
• Promote UNH as a fully-broadband enabled university and thought leader,
• Engage world technology leaders to expand broadband research, and
• Weigh in on public policy and regulation through unbiased sharing of facts on broadband.

Established in October 2013, BCOE has funded several demonstration projects aimed at realizing real-world breakthroughs.  Most recently, BCOE has awarded two grants to UNH researchers:

The first study, led by Gopal Mulukutla, a research scientist at the Earth Systems Research Center within the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS), and assisted by EOS researcher Michael Routhier and Associate Professor Wilfred Wollheim, will devise, test and implement smart sensor-based wireless broadband networks to conduct water quality monitoring in Nashua, New Hampshire, and beyond. The team will implement a fully functional network at the Mine Falls dam and canal system in Nashua to isolate the timing and location of pollution sources. If successful, UNH intends to pursue commercial applications for detecting water quality problems around the world.

The second grant, to UNH Professor of Physics Joachim Raeder and Nicholas Kirsch, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Founding Director of the Connectivity Research Center, aims to build a “smart” magnetometer to sense space weather and transmit data over long distances and deploy hundreds of sensors to create an expansive research network in the Arctic.