Researchers from the UCLouvain have been rewarded for their discovery, the Multipath TCP, a technology which has benefit eight thousand million users, the equivalent of 1 out of 8 smartphones around the world.
Four months ago, the international organization Sigcomm – which gathers every year the world stakeholders in the IT field- gave a prize to scientists from the UC Louvain for their creation: the Multipath TCP.
This award is meant to acknowledge a technology innovation with an influence on a great number of users, which is undoubtedly the case for around eight thousand million iphones equipped with this walloon technology globally.
This device enables people to switch easily from domestic WIFI to 4G. Before this new technology came up, Apple smartphone users had to cope with slow connections or even network cuts when they would leave home. The problem would mostly come up with the Siri vocal assistant.
Motivated by a strong will to help the greatest numbers of users, this group of scientists decided to work directly in an open source format. What does such a decision imply? Well, this means that companies such as Apple, Samsung, LG or Huawei can use this Walloon technology without spending any money! To its creators, Multipath is a very good way to advance scientific research. Every scientific insight originates from open source software. Their inventors did not make money and yet, they did change the world in their own way.
Thanks to such an implementation, from now on, you will know that a bit of Wallonia will always be in your pocket.
