OTT: Our heritage

OTT is established
Optical Technology Training Ltd (OTT), was established in 1989 as a small independent, privately owned UK company. OTT was built on the skill sets of Richard Ednay, with his background in fibre optics, and Sarah Ednay with her background in training development, to become the fibre optics training professionals.

City & Guilds era
OTT became an approved centre of City & Guilds from 1991 and ran the City & Guilds 3466 fibre optic installation awards from 1991 to 2004, followed by the City & Guilds 3666 award from 2004 and the City & Guilds 3667 Level 2 award from 2010 to 2013. The company grew to 18 team members with 8 full-time trainers delivering courses around the UK & Ireland and Europe. By 2013 we decided that the City & Guilds awards no longer fitted in our portfolio. Our range of Certified Optical Fibre Installer (COFI) courses now offer hiqh quality installation training.

Certified Fibre Characterisation Engineer (CFCE) launched
In 2005 OTT recognised that many existing and new fibre infrastructures needed to be tested to check that they were able to support the higher performance communications systems being used. This demanded new more advanced skills from test engineers. OTT launched a unique new course, the Certified Fibre Characterisation Engineer programme (CFCE) to provide test engineers with the knowledge and skills to carry out full fibre characterisation on long distance telecoms networks. Recognising the importance of certifications this programme became the foundation of a new suite of OTT’s own advanced certifications carefully designed to meet real business needs in the industry.

Certified Optical Network Engineer (CONE) launched
As the technology involved in long haul core networks, became increasingly advanced and with more competing approaches being offered, the original Certified Optical Network Engineer (CONE) was introduced to help optical network engineers faced with complex designs and decision making. The programme was designed to help engineers see the big picture and truly understand the impact of different approaches.

As the technology of optical networks continued developing, this course would evolve and get updated and re-written a number of times as the years passed. You can find the latest version of CONE here.

Certified Optical Fibre Installer (COFI) launched
OTT replaced the City & Guilds installation courses in their portfolio with the up-to-date, well-resourced, Certified Optical Fibre Installer (COFI) courses designed to offer best in class installation training, for when quality and professionalism really matter. The COFI course is now available in slightly different versions to suit delegates working on networks in different envrionments, such as Outside plant networks (COFI-OSP), Enterprise networks (COFI-Enterprise) and Harsh environments (custom). It is also available from our partner in South Africa in a customised version, COFI-SA, designed for the African marketplace.

Certified Optical Network Associate (CONA) and the Next Generation CONE 
The technology of advanced optical networks does not stand still. The CONE course grew and it grew, beyond what could possibly be achieved in one week. And so a new certification was born, the Certified Optical Network Associate (CONA). CONA is aimed at those involved in planning, managing and implementing cost-effective optical networks, using direct detection technology. These direct detection systems may be used to provide very high capacity (up to 1.6Tb/s) Ethernet channels within data centres and commonly 100 & 400Gb/s data rates for metro data centre interconnect (DCI). LAN and campus backbones, FTTA & 5G front haul also use direct detection, as do point-to-point FTTH, full fibre business connections and many transport and utility networks. Long haul OTN systems can use direct detection systems to provide capacity of 800Gb/s+ per fibre pair over thousands of km.

The CONE course was also fully revised and updated to focus on the design of systems operating at 100Gb/ and beyond.

OTT partners begin to run OTT courses around the world
In 2014 OTT experienced a sudden change of course, as our Technical Director, Richard Ednay was diagnosed with Myeloma. We completely revised our business model to accommodate his life-changing health circumstances and enable him to continue working in the industry he is passionate about. OTT now concentrates on the design and development of the course materials. We began licensing our certification courses, such as the Certified Fibre Characterisation Engineer (CFCE), Certified Optical Network Associate (CONA), and Certified Optical Fibre Installer (COFI) to partner organisations to deliver. Find a partner near you.

Unique CONE (Certified Optical Network Engineer) course re-launched
Fully updated and completely re-written to cover the latest trends and developments in optical networking, the next generation Certified Optical Network Engineer (CONE) course was launched. The emphasis of the CONE course is providing you with the knowledge and skills you need to set strategies and policies to guide the design of your optical networks to meet key challenges such as: Increasing capacity, Extending Reach, Increasing flexibility, Controlling latency, Providing Quality of Service and Going open and interoperable.

To reflect the international nature of our business, we moved our web presence, from our original site of ott.co.uk to the more geographically independent new domain of ott.training.

Growing the family…
2023 turned out to be a year of growth, with three new partners joining the OTT partner family. We welcomed our new partners: CommsLearning in New Zealand; Butler Technologies in Ireland and Michal Pěček in Austria.

Lots of potential…
So what will 2024 bring? We’re already in discussions with several potential new partners. We’re discussing a couple of potential new certifications to see whether we should be developing them. And we’ve already launched a partners discussion forum as a place where our growing family can chat, turn over ideas and support each other with their varied expertise. So what do you, our valued trainees, past, present and future, want us to be doing and where should our courses be available? Do drop us a line, we’d love to hear from you.