• Technical Conference:  30 March – 03 April 2025
  • Exhibition: 01 – 03 April 2025
  • Moscone Center, San Francisco, California, USA

March 2015

Service Provider Summit at OFC

By Casimer DeCusatis, Ph.D. | Posted: 27 March 2015

As the OFC conference continues, today provided a unique opportunity to hear from some of the industry’s leaders in a slightly less formal setting where business and technology issues come together to create market value.  Of course I’m referring to the Service Provider Symposium, held on the 300,000 square foot exhibit floor at OFC.  

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Hot Topic of Net Neutrality Wraps Up Special Sessions

By OFC | Posted: 26 March 2015

Earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued new rules on net neutrality that are due to go into effect before the summer and will reclassify broadband Internet as a telecommunications service.

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Upbeat Mood at OFC Signals Market Potential

By OFC | Posted: 26 March 2015

Five hundred sixty exhibitors, 106,000 square feet of exhibit space, 12,375 registered attendees, five days in Los Angeles, countless business cards exchanged, meetings taken, pens and Jolly Ranchers handed out and it has all come down to this: Thank you!

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Daily Wrap - Thursday

By OFC Staff | Posted: 26 March 2015

Carriers have long desired greater control over transport so that they could reduce cost, increase availability, reduce time to deliver services and explore new services, such as on demand.

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Networking from a High-Performance Computing Perspective

By OFC | Posted: 26 March 2015

We have known since the dawn of the Computer Age that one thing you can almost always count on, like glorious weather in Los Angeles, is that computer processors tend to get faster, cheaper and smaller— a trend enshrined in Moore's Law.

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SDN Deployments Every Customer Should Love

By OFC | Posted: 25 March 2015

Carriers have long desired greater control over transport so that they could reduce cost, increase availability, reduce time to deliver services and explore new services, such as on demand.

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The Value of Multi-layer SDN

By OFC | Posted: 25 March 2015

Repackaging, something of an art form, is also a viable approach to business because it can save cost or create new ventures. These themes were touched upon during a special symposium at OFC 2015 on Wednesday, which focused on how packaging and integration may be used to dramatically reduce the cost of traditional “gold box” optical modules for different applications in the network.

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OFC Day 3 – OFC Plenaries, Panels, and Rump Sessions

By Casimer DeCusatis | Posted: 25 March 2015

Today was the busiest day yet at OFC, with a full schedule packed with plenaries, invited speakers, tutorials, and much more.  I’ve barely had time to write it all up, but let’s take a quick look at some of the day’s highlights.

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Daily Wrap - Wednesday

By OFC Staff | Posted: 25 March 2015

The plenary session at this year's OFC conference featured three industry experts who spoke on the future of transport networks, the underappreciated role that undersea fiber optic cables play in connecting our modern world, and the potential dangers of entrusting activities traditionally performed by humans to increasingly inscrutable algorithms.

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Hidden Gems at OFC

By Cary Snyder, Principal Analyst at EJL Wireless Research USA, and Consulting Engineer at Sarokal Test Systems Oy, Finland | Posted: 25 March 2015

Anyone attending OFC 2015 knows there is a LOT of material and not everything may apply to their respective interest or work product. However, it is hard to ignore the importance of optics and the role it plays in both the current Mobile Fronthaul/Backhaul Transport and more importantly Next-Generation Mobile Fronthaul for 4.5G (2020) and 5G (2025).

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Metro 100G and Beyond

By OFC | Posted: 24 March 2015

The explosion of digital video, cloud access and data center traffic is driving the growth of 100 Gb/s fiber optic networks, or 100G, in metro environments. Today, 20G or 40G is sufficient for most metro networks, but "going forward, 100G will be the bandwidth of choice," said Michael Belanger, a product manager at Ciena Corporation.

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How Optics Enable a Mobile, Connected World

By OFC | Posted: 24 March 2015

The plenary session at this year's OFC conference featured three industry experts who spoke on the future of transport networks, the underappreciated role that undersea fiber optic cables play in connecting our modern world, and the potential dangers of entrusting activities traditionally performed by humans to increasingly inscrutable algorithms.

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OFC Co-Sponsors Recognize Leaders in Optics

By OFC | Posted: 24 March 2015

The annual OFC awards luncheon, held Tuesday, 24 March 2015, recognizes winners and new Fellows from OFC’s three sponsoring societies: IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Photonics Society and The Optical Society.  The program highlighted excellence among students, scientists and industry professionals.

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Enabling the Cloud Using Optics

By Casimer DeCusatis, Ph.D. | Posted: 24 March 2015

As the OFC conference gets into full swing, I decided to spend some time looking at the clouds.  Not the fluffy white ones outside the Los Angeles Convention Center, of course, but the symposium on enabling the cloud that attracts leading cloud, internet, and telecom service providers. It seems that everyone is interested in cloud computing, and most experts agree that the multi-billion dollar cloud market will continue its double digit growth rates throughout 2015. So it’s hardly a surprise that OFC attendees want to understand how to enable the cloud through optical networking and related technologies.

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Daily Wrap - Tuesday

By OFC Staff | Posted: 24 March 2015

Monday morning's Executive Forum panel was billed as focusing on understanding perspectives from global tier 1 carriers on several key topics in communications infrastructure, and it did not disappoint. What the audience was treated to was deep insight from three subject matter experts.

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The Promise of Software-Defined Networking

By OFC | Posted: 23 March 2015

Software-defined networking (SDN) was the focus of technical session #M2H, “Enabling the Cloud: Unleashing the Capabilities of Emerging Flexible Optical Transport through SDN and NFV I.”

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Executive Forum Part 2: Walking a Mile in Verizon's Shoes

By OFC | Posted: 23 March 2015

Rounding out Monday morning's Executive Forum panel on key topics in communications infrastructure was Glenn Wellbrock, the director of optical transport planning at Verizon.

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Executive Forum Part 1: Global Perspectives on the Future of Optical Communication

By OFC | Posted: 23 March 2015

Monday morning's Executive Forum panel was billed as focusing on understanding perspectives from global tier 1 carriers on several key topics in communications infrastructure, and it did not disappoint. What the audience was treated to was deep insight from three subject matter experts.
 

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How Mobile Drives Optical Fiber Needs

By OFC | Posted: 23 March 2015

Seventeen percent of global Web usage is accounted for by mobile traffic, said Martin Birk of AT&T Labs, Res. This trend is growing everywhere in the world, and its growing fast.

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One Good Thing to Come of the Dot-Com Bust

By OFC | Posted: 23 March 2015

Witness the dot-com boom and bust: a heady time toward the end of the millennium when venture capital funds flowed quickly into internet firms, company valuations were sometimes based on little more than web hits, launch parties boasted A-list celebs, and expectations (not to mention stock prices) were often unreasonably high.

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A Side of Google Most People Will Never See

By OFC | Posted: 23 March 2015

Google is synonymous with internet search. The company also has a suite of well-known applications like Gmail, Google Maps, the Android operating system and the Chrome browser. Google drive and its associated calendar, word processing and spreadsheet apps are ubiquitous. And above all, Google continues to dominate online searches with its eponymous engine—and made it perhaps the only company ever whose name entered the English language as a verb.

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Top 5 Things You Can’t Miss at OFC

By Casimer DeCusatis, Ph.D. | Posted: 23 March 2015

Here are the top five events you should absolutely make time to see during your visit to Los Angeles.

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Daily Wrap - Monday

By OFC Staff | Posted: 23 March 2015

Witness the dot-com boom and bust: a heady time toward the end of the millennium when venture capital funds flowed quickly into internet firms, company valuations were sometimes based on little more than web hits, launch parties boasted A-list celebs, and expectations (not to mention stock prices) were often unreasonably high. We know how that story ended, of course. Even as the champagne was uncorked, bubbles were burst, bankrolls were spent, and many companies failed—a cautionary time that's cast a long shadow ever since.

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Daily Wrap - Sunday

By OFC | Posted: 22 March 2015

We're glad you're here. Each morning of the conference, we'll be sending a daily wrap message — spotlighting things to note for the day ahead and highlights from the day before. Today, we focus on several ways to access Digest Papers from the technical conference.

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The Web-scale Effect and the Future of Networking

By Steve Alexander, Senior VP and CTO at Ciena | Posted: 19 March 2015

Steve Alexander, Senior VP and CTO at Ciena, talks about how networks must continue to evolve to meet the needs of today's on-demand world. 

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Driving Faster, Smarter Networks with SDN

By Stu Benington, Vice President of Cloud and SDN Business Unit, Coriant | Posted: 19 March 2015

Stu Benington, Vice President of Cloud and SDN Business Unit, Coriant discusses how mobile operators can use Software Defined Networking (SDN) to boost their own networks to become more competitive.

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The views expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of The Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC)  or its sponsors.