Podcast: Reflections on the upcoming OFC 2025

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ECOC 2024 industry reflections - Final Part

In the final part, industry figures share their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Contributions are from Adtran’s Jörg-Peter Elbers, Lightwave Logic’s Michael Lebby, and Heavy Reading’s Sterling Perrin.

ECOC exhibition floor

Jörg-Peter Elbers, senior vice presendent, advanced technology, standards and IPR, Adtran, and a General Chair at this year’s ECOC.

ECOC celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. It was great to see scientists, engineers, and industry leaders from all around the globe at a vibrant gathering in Frankfurt.

ECOC dates to September 1975 when the inaugural event – dubbed the “European Conference on Optical Fiber Technology” - was held in London. In the early days, the focus was on megabit-per-second transmission for telephony applications. Now, we are advancing to petabit-per-second speeds to meet AI and cloud services demands. 

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ECOC celebrates its 50th anniversary

• The European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
• The conference and exhibition will take place in Frankfurt, Germany, from September 22-26.
• Key themes at the show include satellite optical communication, artificial intelligence, networking for AI within the data centre, photonic integration, quantum and Green ICT. 

ECOC will celebrate its 50th anniversary this month.

Professor Carmen Mas MachucaThe event will include a special session highlighting the progress made in photonics over the last half century and will feature luminary speakers. 

 There will also be a celebratory event with food stalls from different countries. 

“There will be an opportunity to mingle, and we also plan an exhibition to look back at what has been achieved combined with what directions we need to take for the future,” says Jörg-Peter Elbers, an ECOC General Chair this year. 

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OFC 2024 industry reflections: Part 4

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent OFC show in San Diego. This penultimate part includes the thoughts of Cisco’s Ron Horan, Coherent’s Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi, and Adtran’s Jörg-Peter Elbers.

Ron Horan, Vice President Product Management, Client Optics Group, Cisco   

Several years ago, no one could have predicted how extensive the network infrastructure required to support artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) back-end networks in data centres would be. This year's OFC answered that question. In a word, immense.

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ECOC 2023 industry reflections - Final Part

Gazettabyte has been asking industry figures to reflect on the recent ECOC show in Glasgow. The final instalment emphasises coherent technology with contributions from Adtran, Cignal AI, Infinera, Ciena, and Acacia.

The popular Market Focus sessions at ECOC

Jörg-Peter Elbers, head of advanced technology at Adtran

The ECOC 2023 conference and show was a great event. The exhibition floor was busy and offered ample networking opportunities. In turn, the conference and the Market Focus sessions provided information on the latest technologies, products, and developments.

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ECOC '22 Reflections - Final Part

Gazettabyte has asked industry and academic figures for their thoughts after attending ECOC 2022, held last month in Basel, Switzerland. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned, and what, if anything, surprised them.

In the final part, Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi of Coherent, Acacia’s Tom Williams, ADVA’s Jörg-Peter Elbers and Fabio Pittalà of Keysight Technologies share their thoughts.

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ADVA enables the sharing of spectrum at the optical layer

• Spectrum-as-a-service enables third parties to run networks over existing optical infrastructure.

• ADVA has also simplified linking systems to the metro-access network using self-tuning SFP+ optical modules.

ADVA has developed a scheme whereby communications service providers can sell unused fibre capacity to customers to design and run their own optical networks.

“Optical spectrum-as-a-service gives communications service providers tools to sell spectrum to someone else who now doesn’t need to build a parallel infrastructure,” says Jörg-Peter Elbers, ADVA’s senior vice president, advanced technology, standards and IPR.

 Jörg-Peter Elbers

ADVA has also developed a G.metro-compliant dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) scheme to simplify linking business parks, radio cell towers and small cells to a metro-access network.

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