May 8, 2006 Stockholm -- At the FTTH Council Europe's annual General Assembly, held April 25 and 26 in Stockholm, members voted unanimously to continue with the majority of the present board, and to extend the council's number by an additional two individuals.
Five new member organizations were also accepted into the FTTH Council Europe - including Dantex Plastrør, Dätwyler, Ignis Photonyx A/S, Mitsubishi Electric and Volker Wessels Telecom - boosting the council's total membership to 59.
Newly elected board members include Joeri Van Bogaert (NBG Fiberoptic), Tibor van Melsem Kocsis (Emtelle), and Rami Houbby (Allied Telesyn). Also, Morgan David (Motorola) and Olivier Danthine (GNS) joined as chairs of the board's market development and regulatory committees, respectively.
"After an energetic and productive General Assembly, which has demonstrated its faith in the current direction of the council, I'm very pleased to welcome our new members and look forward to working closely with them to achieve our aims," said Hartwig Tauber, professor of corporate and e-Business management at the University of Applied Sciences (Krems, Austria), who was re-elected President of the FTTH Council Europe for a second term. "There is a great deal to do on so many levels, and I believe that the board can continue to successfully lead the council toward accelerating the uptake of fiber-based technologies and services across Europe."
The FTTH Council Europe is a market development organization whose charter is to work with European governments, policy-makers, and opinion leaders to qualify and quantify the benefits to be gained from fiber-based broadband access networks, and to identify and help to erode the barriers to their development in Europe. Council members are drawn from the telecoms vendors, broadband content providers, and academic sectors.