PRESS RELEASE

12 March 2012

Contact:
Lyndsay Meyer OFC/NFOEC +1.202.416.1435 lmeyer@osa.org

OFC/NFOEC Ends on High Note in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES, March 12—The optical communications industry’s leading event wrapped up last week in Los Angeles with increased attendance, a larger show floor and plenty of buzz and enthusiasm surrounding the innovations presented in the technical sessions.

Nearly 800 technical presentations covered topics such as an elastic optical network for enabling terabit speeds, a graphene-based optical modulator, a record-speed wireless data bridge, and optical interconnects for enabling future computers. The popular post-deadline paper session, which saw a spike of 25% more submissions this year, featured the most timely breakthroughs in the research field – including a record 405 Terabit/s transmission speed demonstrated by a team of researchers in Japan.

OFC/NFOEC’s most well-attended program, the Plenary and Awards Session, featured three high-level speakers on three unique topics. Isao Sugino, R&D director in Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications gave a comprehensive overview the devastation caused to the telecommunication networks in Japan after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, as well as a look at what Japan is doing to protect its ICT infrastructure against future disasters. Greg Papadopoulos, venture partner with New Enterprise Associates and former CTO of Sun Microsystems, spoke on exa-scale computing and what it means for the optics industry. Google’s Vice President of Access Networks, Milo Medin, spoke on the current “age of abundance” and what that means for bandwidth, network speeds, and consumer demand.

In the exhibition hall, companies presented the latest technologies in 100 and even 400G, optical packet transport, passive optical networks, gigabit Ethernet, coherent systems and more. Building off of last year’s 20 percent increase in size, the show floor again expanded by another 10 percent this year—covering more than five football fields’ worth of space. Companies were on hand to demonstrate products and discuss the latest in timely industry trends such as optical interconnects for data centers, silicon photonics, WDM, and more.

Exhibit hall attendees heard from a diverse group of company representatives as part of OFC/NFOEC’s Market Watch, Service Provider Summit and other panel discussions.  Verizon’s Stu Elby gave a keynote address on “Cloud Computing as a Service,” while other show floor discussion topics included monetization of the network, advanced integrated photonics, lighting up the datacenter, and photonic start-ups.

Overall the number of attendees grew to more than 12,000—the fourth year in a row the event has seen an increase. Rounded out by 560 exhibitors, OFC/NFOEC 2012 showed that the optical communications field is on the forefront of growth and innovation worldwide.  Join us next year when OFC/NFOEC moves to Anaheim, Calif., March 17-23, 2013.

About OFC/NFOEC

For more than 35 years, the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/ National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) has been the premier destination for converging breakthrough research and innovation in telecommunications, optical networking and, recently, datacom and computing. Uniting service providers, systems companies, enterprise customers, IT businesses and component manufacturers, along with researchers, engineers and development teams, OFC/NFOEC combines dynamic business programming, an exposition of more than 500 companies and cutting-edge peer-reviewed research into one event that showcases the trends and pulse of the entire optical communications industry.

OFC/NFOEC is managed by the Optical Society (OSA) and co-sponsored by OSA, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Communications Society (IEEE/ComSoc) and the IEEE Photonics Society. Acting as a non-financial technical co-sponsor is Telcordia Technologies, Inc. Visit www.ofcnfoec.org.

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