Bell Labs NL is to be closed

Bell Labs is a small group divided over two locations. One close to the technical university in Enschede and one in Hilversum - currently with a total of 18 employees. A year ago there was over 30, mainly the younger ones don’t believe in a future with Alcatel-Lucent and many have already left the company.

The department is part of Bell Labs, the head of which is based in Nuremberg. It is doing basic research on a broad field. Access, Ethernet transport, converged service platforms and applications. In other words it is the soul of the company working on future products. The department is 50% funded by the government - the Dutch government as well as the EU.

According the company we can do without due to the fact that the same work is being done in former Alcatel (Antwerp and Paris). The magic word is “Overlap”. They tried to illustrate this overlap in the Org chart on page 3 of their Request for Advice (Intranet, PDF). On the left the Lucent part and on the right the Alcatel part. The dotted lines indicate this "overlap".

The closing will be phased in different steps in line with the end dates of the current projects.

Just due to announcing the closer, the department has no future anymore. Even if we would be able to stop this, the employees will leave the company and without employees you don’t have a department.

We have also heard that Bell Labs in the UK will be closed, too.