Conference Theme

During the last decade, we have all witnessed the tremendous growth in wireless and optical communications. New technologies and network info-structures have made high-tech dreams into reality, bringing new products and services ubiquitously to our workplace and daily life while turning novel devices and systems rapidly into low-margin commodities. Coming along with the exuberant growth of new business opportunities and are challenges in building sustainable businesses and managing proper technologies. Riding the turbulent waves in telecom evolution, WOCC has become an important and pivotal event for telecommunication professionals in both the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific Region.

Around the world, proliferation of personal computers and mobile devices has been enabling and demanding real-time, multimedia traffic flows in wired and wireless communications networks. In search of killer applications over the Internet, WOCC 2002 has successfully launched a new Multimedia track paralleling the Wireless and Optical tracks. To reflect the current trend of telecom consolidation and transformation, the theme of WOCC 2003 is "Meeting the Broadband Challenge: The Interplay between Technologies and Applications for the Mobile Internet Era."

While the carriers wrestle with overcapacity in the core optical networks, the wired and wireless access networks continue to be the bandwidth bottleneck for delivering broadband multimedia services from content providers to end-users. Our challenge stems from the following interplay between the deployed technology and applications: The broadband services should provide sufficient performance and wide enough penetration of services reaching that performance level to encourage the deployment of new applications.¹ In addition, the reliable and real-time delivery of multimedia information demands seamless integration of the wired and wireless access networks and the optical core networks. Together, the three technical tracks of WOCC present a crossbred platform for experts from each field to interact and exchange ideas. It also provides us opportunities to network and learn emerging technologies and applications in this challenging broadband arena.

¹ Broadband Bringing Home The Bits, pp.78-81, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 2002.