FTTH Council Europe elects new president, calls for ten-fold Increase in FTTH penetration by 2010-2012
APRIL 27, 2007 -- Following the FTTH Council Europe's (search for FTTH Council Europe) Annual General Assembly held last week in Brussels, Joeri Van Bogaert has been announced as the newly elected president of the board. The Council also is calling upon the industry to meet an ambitious target of "a ten-fold increase of new connections over the next 3-5 years."
"With FTTH deployment now recognized as 'the choice' for real broadband access within Europe, and as major implementations of the technology begin to approach, the Council has decided to shift to the next gear in order to ensure that the decision makers across Europe choose FTTH as their access technology," explains Van Bogaert.
The Council notes that the FTTH environment has significantly changed since its inception three years ago. Influenced by the significant increase in the dynamics behind the European market, the Council has announced an organizational restructure. The new committee structure, as determined at the General Assembly, is as follows:
• Deployment & Operation will research infrastructure and architecture issues within an economical dimension, including active and passive technology, energy consumption, environmental topics, rights of way, and maintenance.
• Network and Service Revenues will focus on all topics surrounding end-user offerings such as services, contents, average revenue per user (ARPU), end-user expectations, and customer-support.
• Market Intelligence will expand the existing market development focus to include economical and macro-economic information and private funding topics for investors and deployers.
• Public Policy & Regulation will position Council proposals toward the European Commission, addressing policy makers to convince them that FTTH is necessary for a competitive Europe.
• Communications Committee will handle the external and internal communications of the Council.
• Editorial Board will be responsible for the overarching messaging, positioning, and content development.
In addition there will be several ad-hoc working groups, such as the already established FTTH Sustainable Development Group.
The full list of members of the board is as follows:
• President of the board: Joeri Van Bogaert, Leoni NBG Fiber Optics
• Treasurer: Jan De Groot, OFS
Board of Directors:
• Jean-Pierre Lartigue, Alcatel-Lucent
• Wolfgang Fischer, Cisco
• Tadhg Leonard, Corning
• Christian Emborg, DKT
• Tibor van Melsem Kocsis, Emtelle
• Mats Hansson, Ericsson
• Jean-Pierre Coudreuse, Mitsubishi Electric
In addition, the FTTH Council Europe has extended a public call for candidates for the position of a full-time director general. The position is designed to develop continuity in the work of the FTTH Council as it moves forward into what is perhaps the most crucial time for European FTTH. A full job description for the general director position is available at the FTTH Council Europe secretariat at [email protected].