Bowing to the travel limitations and social distancing restrictions that have become commonplace due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, organizers of the 46th Annual European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) have postponed the event. ECOC will now take place December 6-10, 2020. It will remain in Brussels. The new dates put ECOC in close chronological proximity to another postponed European optical conference to be held in Barcelona, Spain.
The ECOC exhibition floor is slated to be open December 7-9. ECOC originally was scheduled to take place September 20-24. The conference and exhibition is one of if not the major optical communications events in Europe, particularly for the components and subsystems community.
“By postponing ECOC 2020 we will significantly increase the possibility of a successful edition (in person!) of our exhibition and IMEC, our partner in organizing the conference,” read a statement posted earlier this week on the exhibition website, which is run by the exhibition’s organizer, Nexus Media Events. “In light of this the conference has decided to postpone the paper submission deadline to 28 August, thus offering the possibility to complete the experiments which in many laboratories have come to a halt due to the corona crisis.”
Nexus states that additional information should be available on the exhibition website by this Thursday, May 14. A similar statement was posted on the conference homepage. Last year's exhibition, held in Dublin, attracted 6,569 visitors, according to the show organizers.
The new dates mean ECOC will begin less than a week after the close of another major European optical communications event, the Next Generation Optical Networking & Data Center Interconnect (NGON & DCI) World conference. That event will now take place December 1-3, 2020, in Barcelona, having moved from its original dates in early June.
“Having made the decision to postpone NGON & DCI World to December (1-3), we have every confidence that it will successfully run as rescheduled,” reads a statement posted on the show’s website by organizers at Informa Tech. “As we all hope to return to ‘business as usual’ as soon as safely possible, and as we plan ahead, we will continue to closely monitor the developments and adhere to any guidelines issued by local and national authorities, public health advice, and WHO that may be relevant then to ensure safety and well being of our customers, partners, and staff. For this reason, we have also changed our terms to safeguard any sponsorship and exhibitor bookings in the event of a future cancellation.”
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