 I'm here at the ITU in Geneva and I'm very pleased to be joined by Steven Trowbridge, Chairman of Study Group 15 on Transport and Access. Steven, welcome and thank you very much indeed for joining us here today. Thank you Fred, I'm happy to be here. So I wonder if you could explain to our viewers a little bit about Study Group 15 and how we might see your work at play in our daily lives. Well Study Group 15 is responsible for networks, transport and infrastructure with respect to transport networks with respect to access networks and with respect to home networks and so for a wide variety of applications we carry the bits so the reason so many of the things we use in our daily lives work is that the bits get from one place to another. Many of those happen without the end users having the awareness of how the bits get across the network. And speaking of bits you know some figures say that over 95% of traffic is you know transported over fiber optic cables. Can you please explain how ITU standards help to make that possible? Well ITU is responsible for many of the standards with respect to to fiber optics and cables in particular so G652 is a very well-known ITT recommendation for the most commonly deployed type of single mode fiber which carries information over over fairly long distances. We're also responsible for a lot of the the technology for how optical signals are carried over those networks the WDM technologies to be able to maximize how much information we can carry over an optical fiber. A lot of the applications are quite diverse much more diverse than they were back in the days when everything was carried over telco networks but much of our technology is used today in everything ranging from traditional telco to more specialized applications including data center interconnect mobile front hall and back hall video distribution and so forth. And speaking of fiber it seems you've also been famous for squeezing fiber-like speeds out of copper through your GFAST standard. Can you please explain to our viewers how fast GFAST is and how are operators benefiting from this? Yes G.FAST in its most recent revision has just made the jump from 1 gigabits to 2 gigabits per second over copper as you say. The other thing I think to be aware of mostly this is directed at being able to increase speeds in the very last segments of the network which are places where it's impractical to to replace the cable every time you want to move to a new speed so that last segment from the curb to the house for example or you don't want to tear open home orders walls in order to install new cable types you try to milk as much as you can with the cable that's already there and that's what a lot of these technologies are aimed at. It's important to note that this is not simply the GFAST access network but a lot of our work in home networking applies the same kind of technologies to be ever increasing bandwidth needs. Besides increasing the speeds we're applying these technologies to an increasing array of media types so it's not just the twisted pair wiring that of course DSL was designed to run over but we go over coaxial networks things that were installed for TV distribution in the first place. We have within the home networking we have power line transmission to take advantage of the power wires in the house and even cat five cat six ethernet type cables so we're able to run over many of the installed base of infrastructure of copper interconnectivity. And you know jumping from copper to 5G you know 5G it's a lot more of a broadband on steroids and some people seem to think that this is you know the domain of the wireless but that's not really the case is it? No it's not in in fact everybody thinks the network is mobile and in fact the only thing that's really mobile are the users of the network so we all carry our own devices wherever we go but the only thing that's wireless is from your device to the nearest antenna and as 5G dramatically increases the amount of bandwidth that's accessible to the average end user because there's only so much spectrum available in the air what that means is that the antenna has to get closer and closer to the end user in order to take maximum advantage of that spectrum which means more and more infrastructure based on the kind of technologies that Study Group 15 develops is something that's necessary in order to to get that bandwidth out closer and closer to the end user. So mobile front hall and back hall is definitely a very important focus of a lot of our work and something we're applying Study Group 15 technologies to. And you know we're here at the start of a new four-year study period what are some of the new priorities for the Study Group? Well it's hard to say new priorities because I think it tends to be a continual evolution of what the technologies are and how they're applied so Study Group 15 has a long history of having been responsible for many of the technologies that get information carried across the network over particularly long distances but also in those last segments in the access networks and home networks. I think some of the interesting evolution is that so much more of the traffic ends up being focused on getting things in and out of data centers and between data centers. So once upon a time when the network traffic was predominantly voice telephone calls or modem or fax traffic that was one particular network model but the network applications that use more of the bits are things like video. So somebody goes and watches the YouTube video that's a lot of bits and that probably is going between an end user from a data center to an end user. So there's a lot of those kinds of applications. I think more and more of the topology of the network changes but the technology we use to get the bits over any particular fiber route is enhancement and evolution of what we've done all along. Of course our technologies improve year over year, decade over decade so what we used to have with individual signals going over individual fibers is of course well beyond that so we're transmitting data at more than 100 gigabits per second per wavelength, many many wavelengths on a fiber with DWDM technologies. So the optical modulation has become coherent formats which use very sophisticated modulation to get very very high bit rates over each wavelength on a fiber. Well Steven thank you very much indeed for joining us here today and I'd like to wish you the best of luck and success with your next study period. Thank you very much. Thank you.