CSELT

Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni (CSELT) was an Italian research center for Telecommunication based in Torino, the biggest in Italy and one of the most important in Europe. It was active from 1964 to 2001, initially as a part of the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale-STET – Società Finanziaria Telefonica group, the major conglomerate of Italian public Industries in the 1960s and 1970s; it later became part of Telecom Italia Group. In 2001 was renamed TILAB as part of Telecom Italia Group.

Research areas

CSELT became internationally known at the end of 1960s thanks to a cooperation with the US-based company COMSAT for a pilot project of TDMA (and PCM) satellite communication system. Furthermore in 1971 it started a joint research with Corning Glass Works on optical fiber cables: as a result, in 1977 Torino was the first city having optic fibers lines, with a 9 km length (the longest at that time), collaborating with Sirti and Pirelli. In 1978 CSELT became also famous because of its 3D images of the Shroud of Turin supervised by Prof. Giovanni Tamburelli: that images were the most highly resolved till that time and for the first time was showed the native "3D structure" of the Shroud itself. In 1975 was also released MUSA, the first Italian speech synthezer, and one of the very first in the world: later, the same group made research also in speech recognition: the both technologies were used as auto-responder systems in telco services.

The Last years

Several research were made later in Optics circuits, microprocessor, antennas and all the fields of Telecommunication as member of international standard gropup, such as W3C. At the end of 1980s, the CSELT Engineer Leonardo Chiariglione chaired the MPEG group, and released audio-video standard such as MPEG-1, MP3, MPEG-4 in cooperation with several companies worldwide. In 1999 was experimented the first UMTS call in a European city and in 1996 (with Telecom Italia Mobile) was released the first GSM pre-paid card in the world.

In 2001 CSELT was renamed in TILAB (Telecom Italia group) and the successful speech and voice reserarch group was spined-off in the newco Loquendo.

References

• Luigi Bonavoglia, CSELT trent'anni, Ed. CSELT, 1994 CSELT trent'anni
• Cristiano Antonelli, Bruno Lamborghini, Impresa pubblica e tecnologie avanzate: il caso della STET nell'elettronica, Il Mulino,Bologna 1978.
• Bottiglieri, Bruno, STET. Strategie e struttura delle telecomunicazioni, Franco Angeli, Milano 1987.
• Bottiglieri, Bruno, SIP. Impresa, tecnologia e Stato nelle telecomunicazioni italiane, Franco Angeli, Milano 1990.
• Virginio Cantoni, Gabriele Falciasecca, Giuseppe Pelosi, Storia delle Telecomunicazioni, vol.1, Firenze : Firenze university press, 2011.
• Andrea Piccaluga, "La valorizzazione della ricerca scientifica. Come cambia la ricerca pubblica e quella industriale", Ed. Franco Angeli, 2002. ISBN 978-88-464-3153-0