ECOC 2005 Plenary Speakers

Mo2.1.1         09:30 – 10:00
Invited - Next Generation Broadband: Market Led or State Intervention?
W Webb , Ofcom , United Kingdom
BT and others are currently deploying broadband networks around the UK . While these provide speeds well in excess of narrowband dial-up, there are many indications that required speeds might rise as high as 100Mbits/s by around 2017. Based on current technological trends it seems likely that only fibre deployments are capable of meeting these demands, however, there has been little deployment of fibre to the home to date. This paper considers the likelihood of industry deploying fibre and examines whether there is a case for state intervention rather than leaving deployment to the free market.

Mo2.1.2         10:30 - 11:00
Invited – The Strategic Review: Equivalence, and Implications for Next Generation nNetworks
P McCarthy-Ward, Director of Equivalence, BT Group, UK

Mo2.1.3         11:00 – 11:30
Invited - Optical Communications in 2025
E Desurvire , Alcatel CTO Office , France
In 20 years, optical networks will have to carry vastly increased amounts of IP traffic. Today's knowledge points to ultimate technology limits, which are discordant with market prospects. Basic research must urgently be revived today in order to meet tomorrow's needs.

Mo2.1.4         11:30 - 12:00
Invited - Packet-switching with little or no buffers
N McKeown , Stanford University, United States
All-optical networks are a pipedream, so said the networking community. An Internet router needs big buffers to hold packets during times of congestion (conventional wisdom said we needed to buffer a million packets for a 10Gb/s link) and there is no way you can build optical buffers that big. QED. It turns out the conventional wisdom was wrong: Reduce the buffering by two orders of magnitude, and both delay and jitter go down. The user is better off, and the operator doesn't lose any throughput. Nowadays, backbone traffic is so aggregated and smooth that you could reduce buffers to just a few dozen packets. Does this mean we could deploy all-optical routers after all?

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