Business

The OSA Foundation has launched a fundraising campaign to establish an award in honour of the late optical communications pioneer Tingye Li. The Tingye Li Innovation Award will recognise top-performing young professionals who have demonstrated innovation in their research presented at the annual OFC Conference and Exposition.

Time Warner Cable has completed the purchase of DukeNet Communications for $600 million, acquiring an 8,700-mile fibre optic network in the south-eastern US states of North and South Carolina.

The purchaser wants to use the additional network to connect and serve business customers with services such as voice, high-speed internet and cloud-enabled hosting. It also expects to use the extra capacity to grow its carrier business, which provides network access to wireless providers. Time warner Cable provides services to more than 10,000 cell towers around the USA.

Prysmian Group has announced a new organisational structure and management appointments with the goal of stimulating the group's growth strategy and of anticipating market developments by aiming to further improve its focus on customer service. The new organisational structure will be effective from 1 January.
 
Fabio Romeo, currently executive vice president of the energy business, will take responsibility for corporate strategy and development, with the mission of giving further impetus to the group’s growth.
 

At the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington DC in December, IBM’s Dr Solomon Assefa presented a major advance in the ability to use light instead of electrical signals to transmit data for computing. The breakthrough technology, called ‘silicon nanophotonics’ is able to transport information via pulses of light through optical fibres in order to deal with the growing volumes of data being created and transmitted over enterprise networks.

Transmode has appointed Mark Stevens as its VP for the Asia-Pacific region. Stevens will be responsible for the company's activities in the region and will be based in Singapore, which has been his home for several years.

Koch Industries has completed a $7.2 billion acquisition of Molex, a global electronic components company.

The acquisition was finalised through the merger of Koch Industries’ wholly owned subsidiary, Koch Connectors, with and into Molex. As a result of the merger, Molex is now an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, retaining its name and headquarters in Lisle, Illinois. The company will continue to be operated by its current management team.

The Optical Society and the IEEE Photonics Society have announced that Kazuro Kikuchi of the University of Tokyo in Japan is the recipient of the 2014 John Tyndall Award.

Data traffic on metropolitan (metro) access and aggregation networks is set to increase by 560 per cent by 2017, driven by demand for video and the proliferation of data centres, according to a study.

Eircom has announced an increase to its planned national fibre footprint from 1.2 million homes and businesses to 1.4 million homes and businesses across Ireland.

The plans mean that, by July 2016, 70 per cent of the country is scheduled to have access to fibre broadband speeds of up to 100Mbs.

The company says its fibre programme is ahead of schedule and is on track to pass 700,000 premises by the end of the year. Today’s announcement means that an 562 additional communities across the country will be able to connect to Eircom’s eFibre service.

Australian campaigners have delivered a 270,000-strong petition to the country's government, highlighting demands for a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network rather than the proposed fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) solution.

The petition, posted on the Change.org website, is thought to be the biggest online petition ever filed in Australia.

The petition, organised by Nick Paine, states: 'As currently proposed, the Coalition’s FTTN solution relies on the existing copper lines to supply individual premises access to the National Broadband Network (NBN) over the last mile or so.