Technical Conference: 15 - 19 March 2026
Exhibition: 17 - 19 March 2026
Los Angeles Convention Center | Los Angeles, California, United States

Technical Conference: 15 - 19 March 2026
Exhibition: 17 - 19 March 2026
Los Angeles Convention Center | Los Angeles, California, United States

Rump Session: From Short Hops to Long Hauls: What Parts of the Fiber Spectrum Shall We Use, and Why?

17 Mar 2026
19:30 - 21:00
Room 502A

Imagine hollow-core fiber has reached maturity. It is no longer specialty fiber; it is now cost-competitive with standard fibre. And hollow-core fiber has enticing properties:

•    sub 0.1 dB/km loss,
•    ultra-low nonlinearity,
•    optimal latency.

Where would you deploy it and if you did, would you exploit existing frequency bands or adopt new ones?

This is the Rump Session’s evening’s theme: Which wavelength bands win, why, and where? Do the O-band and C+L band incumbents survive? Or do new challenger bands (S/E/U/Mid-IR,…) crash the party?

A superb panel of provocateurs will debate just this.

The Format: 90 minutes of talk, debate, and banter involving three provocateur teams across three rounds:

Round 1: Intra-data center connectivity (AI clusters, from centimeters up to 10km reach) 

Round 2: Access, data centre interconnect, and metro networks 

Round 3: Long-haul, scale-across (>120km-1000km), and submarine

The task of the three competing teams is to shape a vision across the three rounds.  The audience then casts their votes for the team with the most compelling arguments.

Join us at what should prove to be a fun, provocative evening, and where you can add to the debate!

Organizers

  • Roy Rubenstein

    LightCounting LLC, United States

  • Antonio Tartaglia

    Ericsson, Italy

  • Dirk Van Den Borne

    Juniper Networks Inc., Germany

Speakers

  • Ben Puttnam

    Microsoft, United Kingdom

  • Brian Kim

    Lumentum, United States

  • Chigo Okonkwo

    Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands

  • Daryl Inniss

    LightCounting, United States

  • Glenn Wellbrock

    Verizon, United States

  • Haoshuo Chen

    Nokia Bell Labs, United States

  • Jim Zou

    Adtran, Germany

  • Josè Pozo

    Optica, Netherlands

  • Lara Garrett

    Subcom, United States

  • Maxim Kushnerov

    Huawei, Germany

  • Mike Frankel

    Google, United States

  • Wladek Forysiak

    University of Bristol, United Kingdom