• Technical Conference:  15 – 19 March 2026
  • Exhibition: 17 – 19 March 2026
  • Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, California, USA

2025 Rump Session

Reconnecting the Earth

Tuesday, 01 April, 19:30 – 21:00

Theater I, Exhibit Floor

If a Global Disaster Struck and all the Optical Infrastructure was Wiped Out, Would You Rebuild with Today’s Mainstream Technologies?

This rump session would have advocates of new fibers and new optical switching and amplification technologies exchange rhetorical blows with defendants of today’s mainstream technologies.

  • Do we just go back to O-band, C-band, InP lasers, EDFAs, G.652 fiber?
  • Would this blank slate eliminate the support of legacy systems and provide dramatic efficiency improvements?
  • Can we jettison the IEEE/OIF standards?
  • Will there be any copper at all?

Team A
Chris Doerr, Aloe Semiconductors, USA
Tad Hofmeister, Google, USA
Maxim Kushnerov, Huawei, Germany
Rebecca Schaevitz, Mixx Technologies, USA

Team B
Polina Bayvel, Univ. College London, UK
Vijay Vusirikala, Arista Networks, USA
Dave Welch, Attotude, USA
Peter Winzer, Nubis Communications, USA

Team C
Chris Cole, Coherent Corp., USA
Jorg-Peter Elbers, Adtran, Germany
Katherine Schmidtke, Eribel Systems, USA
Glenn Wellbrock, Verizon, USA

Organizers

Antonio Tartaglia (Lead), Ericsson, Italy

Roy Rubenstein, LightCounting LLC, United States

Dirk Van Den Borne, Juniper Networks Inc., Germany