OFC/NFOEC Plenary Session keynote speakers are:

Brian Herlihy
President, SEACOM, Mauritius
Presentation: Broadband in Africa
Presentation Overview: 17,000 km of undersea fiber optic cable is now linking South Africa to India and Europe via Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Djibouti and Egypt. SEACOM is the first cable to provide broadband to countries in East Africa, the last region in the world to be connected to a submarine fiber optic network. SEACOM is a major catalyst in moving the dynamic African communications market from a voice-centric model to a data-centric model based on broadband technologies. Herlihy will address the technical achievements that made possible these new milestones of connectivity.

Philippe Keryer
Executive Vice President, Alcatel-Lucent, USA
President, Carrier Product Group, Alcatel-Lucent, USA
Presentation: Beyond Today’s Broadband Networks
Presentation Overview: As end users and enterprises become further immersed in the Web and its ever-expanding possibilities, traffic is expected to grow exponentially over the next years, driven by the new generation web-based applications. Demand for bandwidth — both wired and wireless — is soaring, requiring increased capacities at submarine and terrestrial levels. As end users want seamless and always-on access to services, they also expect a quality of experience greater than ever. For carriers and service providers, this translates into a need to continuously scale the network across multiple dimensions while supporting the lowest total cost of ownership. Keryer will talk about those key challenges and Alcatel-Lucent’s vision on how current broadband networks have to evolve to a full IP multiservice network, with a focus on the key role optical transport innovations, technologies and solutions has to play in this transformation.

Hideo Miyahara
President, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan
Presentation: Challenges for New Generation Networks
Presentation Overview: In this talk, Miyahara will look back over the past five decades, during which the industry has witnessed dramatic technological changes in information and communication technologies (ICT). Miyahara will discuss the role ICT should be playing in our society over the next 50 years. Then, from the viewpoint of ICT, he will review the challenges the field will face in developing a new generation network (NWGN), which is envisioned as a post–IP network. In pursuing the NWGN program, Miyahara has come to believe that the industry needs collaborative research with specialists from various fields. He will introduce, as an example, the interdisciplinary research project currently being pursued by NICT and Osaka University.