At OTT we believe in standards, the ones we set for ourselves for the high quality of our services and the ones set by the industry for the technology we are passionate about. If the subject of standards has just made you yawn, then have a read of our story “What have Standards ever done for us?” and we hope we can convince you of their importance.
OTT’s level of technical expertise in fibre optics is unrivalled amongst general telecoms training companies. This expertise feeds directly into the quality of our training ensuring that all course materials are up-to-date with the latest developments in the standards and in the industry.
Richard Ednay, Technical Director of OTT, has more than 40 years of experience in fibre optics and set up OTT in 1989. He is a well-known expert throughout the fibre optics industry, both in the UK and internationally, and for years, he regularly attended the world’s leading fibre optic conferences, ECOC and OFC in person and he now attends these technical conferences remotely. Richard is directly involved in International Standards setting in fibre optics and again, he used to attend the meetings in person all over the world, and now attends the hybrid meetings online. His personal carbon footprint has plummeted!
In 2006 Richard was nominated as the UK’s Principal Expert on the IEC SC86C Working Group 1 – ‘Fibre optics communications systems and subsystems’. In the IEC he took on project leader responsibilities for updating the standards on attenuation, return loss and PMD testing of installed singlemode cabling.
Due to Richard’s broad base of expertise in fibre optics that embraces multimode and singlemode fibres, datacoms and telecoms applications , infrastructure and optical networking systems, he was appointed to act as liaison between two standards groups: IEC SC86C that deals with Fibre Optic Systems and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC25 Working Group 3 that deals with customer premises cabling. This working group is the one responsible for the well-known ISO/IEC 11801 Generic Cabling standard. In 2008, Richard was a recipient of the IEC’s prestigious 1906 Award for his outstanding contribution to the development of International Standards in fibre optics.
In the UK, as chairman of BSI GEL86/3, Richard is also responsible for co-ordinating the UK input to the other IEC SC86C Working Groups that include WG2: Fibre optic sensors; WG3: Optical amplifiers & WG4: Active devices.
Richard is also a member of BSI GEL86 (Fibre optics), BSI GEL 86/1 (fibres and cables) and GEL86/2 (connectors and passive devices). He is a past member of BSI TCT7/1 (premises cabling) and BSI EPL76 (laser safety), as well as the International Working group on laser safety of fibre optic communication systems TC76 WG5.
OTT has been an Associate Member of ITU-T Study Group 15 and in 2008 Richard was responsible for updating the ITU-T Recommendation G.650.3 on testing of installed cabling links. Writing the definition of ‘fibre characterisation’ and contributing much of the content of the document. Richard has also participated in the USA TIA standards forum on specific fibre optics projects Including PMD testing and the initial development of wide band multimode fibre (WBMMF) that later became Internationally standardised as OM5.