Policies and Trends

Report published July 19, 2016 A key function of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is to manage the delivery of the superfast broadband programme and improve digital connectivity. In March 2015, the Coalition Government published a Digital Communications Infrastructure Strategy setting out the infrastructure they believed the United Kingdom needed to support a world-leading digital economy over the next 10 to 15 years. The challenge now is extending broadband coverage to all.  ...

The US National Photonics Initiative (NPI), launched in May 2013, seeks to raise awareness of photonics and its impacts, and to coordinate collaboration between industry, government and academia, with the aim of guiding US photonics funding and strengthening the sector. The NPI is led by the American Physical Society (APS), the IEEE Photonics Society, the Laser Institute of America (LIA), The Optical Society (OSA) and SPIE, the International Society of Optics and Photonics. The launch of...

The Universities and Science Minister responds to criticism of his choice of "eight great technologies". Speaking at the IET Mountbatten Memorial Lecture on 9th October, Mr Willetts defended his selection of the eight technologies chosen to receive additional funding from the Government, but also admitted that there were key technologies that did not make the list. Responding to UNLOC PI Prof Polina Bayvel's comment that "Big data and the subsequent seven technologies all rely on the ava...

Established in 2001, the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) is the UK government's leading advisory board on broadband. Initially working on increasing broadband penetration in the UK, the BSG now focuses on next generation broadband issues, and aims to create a neutral environment for telecoms operators, manufacturers, investors, goverment and many other groups to discuss policy, regulatory and commercial issues.  The BSG has published several reports on next generation broadband, which a...

Report published: March 1, 2013 The telecom bust of the early 2000s was said to be ten times more painful than the dotcom bust that occurred more or less simultaneously. Is the industry now heading for a similar bust? This report investigates the parameters of the current situation: supply and demand wire-line income optical network innovation telecoms investment Download the report here.

Report published: 2012 Key recommendation: The US government, and private industry in combination with academia, need to invent technologies for the next factor-of-100 cost-effective capacity increase in long-haul, metropolitan, and local-area optical networks. The optics and photonics community needs to educate funding agencies, and information and entertainment providers, to the looming roadblock that will interfere with meeting the growing needs for network capacity and flexibility. T...