PAIB’s Optical Industry standardization representative Ghani Abbas has been elected to the OIF (Optical Interworking Forum) Board of Directors.

The hard work of the standardization community often goes unheralded; however without their diligence, our phone calls would not get connected, our web searches would hang continuously, and our TV signals would be less reliable than the weather. Now more than ever - with bandwidth increasing at such a dramatic rate - someone needs to make sure that the net keeps working.

Ghani Abbas presenting at a tradeshow on behalf of the OIF.

The Optical Interworking Forum is a non-profit organization that creates interoperability frameworks. Abbas’ role on the board will include driving a12-month strategic vision, voting on project proposals (as one of only seven board members, which includes participants from AT&T, DTAG and Telecom Italia), and continuing his regular role as a public spokesman and conference speaker. “The OIF has over 90 member companies from all parts of the industry ecosystem. The OIF meets regularly, and often visits carrier premises for insights into their developments.”

Abbas has more than 20 years experience in optics, and having come to Ericsson via the Marconi acquisition, is also proud to count himself among the community that invented SDH. “It was working with SDH that first got me involved with the OIF, just under a decade ago,” Abbas says. “Nowadays the focus has shifted to newer innovations in optical technology such as G-MPLS control plane, 100Gbit/s, OTN and MPLS-TP.”

Abbas also sits on other important standardization bodies, such as the IEEE, ETSI and the ITU-T. He is currently Rapporteur of the G.8032 Ethernet Ring Protection standard. Given his origins, could it be suggested that there is a small Irony that this standard is one of a raft of new features that make Ethernet a technology to eventually supersede SDH? “I don’t think it is ironic that I started off getting patents for SDH technology and am nowadays working on its replacement: while the market certainly needs to migrate to the latest technologies for commercial and network transformation reasons, there are many of us here to ensure that they adhere to the same fundamentals of high quality that the older technologies did,” Abbas said.

Abbas’ appointment (a first member of the Board for Ericsson) is effective as of October 1, 2009.