COTS & Colloq

Many thanks to all who were in Hull today contributing to the Colloq and the COTS meeting. Looking at the stats over 100 people were actively involved or lurking, in the venue or through remote participation. Wow!

My over-riding impression of the day was the energy which began in the morning, and has, I suspect, resulted in meetings being arranged for new partnerships to explore many different areas for next gen, and to JFDI. There seemed to be quite a few novel ideas circulating too.

Thanks to Hull City Council for an amazing venue, great lunch and use of the facilities, and thank you to the Lord Mayor for taking time to talk to us and listen in to the debate.

Thanks to Fibrestream/NextGenUs for pulling together such a quality event in a very short time.

Thanks to the BSG, Malcolm Taylor for chairing, the panelists, Lillian for all the back room work, Kizzy for filming, and of course, all the attendees.

A particular thanks to the exhibitors who between them put on an amazing display of 'FTTH' deployment which didn't seem to quite get the attention it deserved for the skill displayed. AFL for the fibre, Emtelle for fibre blowing and micro-ducting, Lucidos for training, safety and fusion / manual splicing, Virtually Transparent for cloud computing, virtualisation (and a fascinating conversation about virtual Asterisk PBX on a Nokia 95 etc!), Cable & Wireless for telecoms delivery (and Rob!), Allied Telesis for active equipment and HD TV demo, and the diamond drilling guys who luckily didn't demo going through the Guildhall floor!!

And thanks to all those who contributed videos, tweets, blog posts and so on at and since the event.

Please get involved in post-colloq discussion through the forum at http://www.fibrevolution.com.

The COTS steering group meeting is open to all and is on 21st September. BSG will be sending out an email to announce further details.

Further events are already in the planning stages. If you would be interested in being informed about or sponsoring these events, please send an email to info[at]fibrevolution[dot]com

All feedback would be gratefully appreciated, either publicly or privately.

Thank you all. Some very thought-provoking discussion and opinions today to mull over and act upon! There will be a report in more depth shortly. In the meantime, there are tweets on the day #nextgenus and @nextgenus and the COTS webcast will be archived shortly.

Also posted on 5tth.blogspot.com