Senior executives from the BBC and BT are confirmed to speak at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC), which has returned to London for the first time since it was launched more than 40 years ago.
The number of papers submitted for the conference exceeds 800 – on topics such as expanding bandwidth, integration of 400G networks and software defined networks (SDN). The speakers come from a variety of business and science backgrounds and include: BBC’s senior technology executive Matthew Postgate; BT’s managing director for research and innovation, Timothy John Whitley; and Eli Yablonovitch, director of the National Science Foundation (USA) Centre for Energy Efficient Electronics Science.
Industry professionals who have submitted a paper will be notified in June and authors will be asked to confirm their participation in the conference by 5 July 2013. The conference will feature a variety of plenary sessions, panels and workshops.
The ECOC 2013 technical programme chairs are currently seeking workshop proposals to feature at the conference. Previous years have included workshops on software defined photonics, optical networks and advantages and challenges for optical and converged networks.
Sir David Payne, general conference co-chair for ECOC 2013, said: 'I’ve been to ECOC every year since 1975 and it’s the must-attend place to be seen and heard if you are in the photonics industry. The evolution of topics has come a long way from early fibre integration and methods of optical splicing to the capacity of today’s backbone and core networks.
'Along with new optoelectronic devices, these are the key developments to producing stable and accessible broadband infrastructures for the future. And with the continued growth and penetration of the optical internet, these will be hot-topics for years to come.'
ECOC 2013 is hosted by the IET and will be held at ICC London ExCeL, UK from 22 to 26 September 2013.
