May 20, 2005, Chestnut Hill, MA--FiberFest 2005 was held in Boxborough, MA on May 2nd, and in Somerset, NJ on May 9th. Although attendance for Boxborough this year was similar to last year (450 attendees) and attendance for Somerset was down slightly (125 attendees in 2005 versus 200 in 2004), FiberFest chairperson Marjorie Katz from Optimark Fiber Optics (Chestnut Hill, MA) noted that the size of FiberFest was back to where it was in 1999 & 2000 prior to the short-lived telecom "boom".
Sponsored by the New England Fiberoptic Council (NEFC) for the past 10 years, FiberFest 2005 consisted of two separate, one-day tabletop trade shows focusing on the regional fiberoptic markets of New England and The Mid-Atlantic States. The show included company exhibitions as well as different technical symposia for Boxborough and Somerset.
Boxborough's symposium on "New Business Opportunities in FTTP/FTTH" included presentations by Richard Mack, VP and general manager of KMI Research (Nashua, NH), Paul Polishuk, president of Information Gatekeepers (Boston, MA), James Farmer, CTO of Wave7 Optics (Alpharetta, GA), Robert Whitman from Corning (Corning, NY), and Randy Reagan, VP of FONS Corp. (Northboro, MA). The talks focused on FTTx deployments underway in several key telecom markets and the different carrier strategies and system architectures being used.
Somerset's symposium on "Advanced Technology Prospects in the Fiberoptic Industry" also included presentations by Richard Mack, Paul Polishuk, James Farmer, and Robert Whitman, as well as James A. Harrington, head of the Laboratory for the Development of Specialty Fiber Optics at Rutgers University (Piscataway, NJ), and David J. Bishop, VP of nanotechnology research at Bell Labs (Murray Hill, NJ). These symposium presentations discussed applications in hollow waveguides, plastic optical fibers, and overall technical advances in fiberoptics since the 1980s.
The New England Fiberoptic Council is an organization of individual members and corporate sponsors engaged in the research, education, manufacturing, or application of fiberoptic products, or who are professionally involved with the fiberoptics industry. With a primary mission to increase public awareness of the fiberoptic business in general, to communicate the scope of career opportunities available, and to improve the quality of life derived from the use of products and services offered by the industry, the council seeks to accomplish its mission through information access and exchange forums, educational programs, company tours, a bi-monthly newsletter, and FiberFest, an annual trade show.