Over 340 people attended The John Bray Auditorium at Adastral Park, Martlesham Heath to hear David Payne’s lecture on “All Optical Networks”. David’s lecture was eagerly received by the hundreds in attendance, proving to be one of the most popular events for many years. At the end of the lecture and questions, many of the audience stayed behind to talk to Dave.
Please click here to download David’s slides.
Davis Payne (Head of Broadband Architectures and Optical Networks Unit, BT, UK) gave a superb lecture describing a logical case for ‘All Optical Networking’. True to form, Dave told a compelling story which showed portion by portion that optical networking emerges as a true solution from many directions and many arguments at any level including the scientific, the technological, the engineering, the economic, and as a purveyor of capacity and high speed delivery of all sorts of products.
Dave has spent a lifetime in engineering with BT. In the late ‘70s he was at ‘BT labs’ working on single-mode fibre splicing and connectors. He subsequently moved into optical access networks where he led a team in the development of fused fibre couplers. These couplers proved to be an essential component to many optical access architectures. . In 2005 he was awarded the Martlesham Medal for his contribution to optical access networking.
Dave was co-inventor of TPON the first Passive Optical Network and wrote the first BT paper on shared access networks in 1983. The early work on TPON was extended to amplified PONs which culminated in 1991 in an experimental PON with 50 million way split, 500km range carrying 16x2.5Gb/s wavelengths. This work moved on to amplified PONs with more practical splits of ~1000. He then moved into business and traffic modelling looking at drivers of bandwidth and the economic justification for large-scale deployment of optical access and core networks.
It was in 1999 when Dave took over the “Broadband Architecture & Optical Networks Unit” and ran the BT optical research activities until very recently.Dave completes his career as “Principle Consultant on Optical Networks” in the BT design organisation at Adastral Park, Martlesham Heath, UK (formally BT Labs) working on extended reach Passive Optical Networks with the objective of significantly reducing the end to end cost of FTTP solutions.
This was David’s last lecture before retiring from BT, so we wish him the best for the future. Special thanks are due to SAS for sponsoring this and many other Events this year.
