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NCF 2000
Conference reveals how the telecommunications industry trains its own
This past October I made my fourth trek to Chicago to attend the annual conference of the National Communication Forum (NCF 2000), an event sponsored by the International Engineering Consortium (IEC) and a host of telecommunications industry leaders. Associated with the conference every year are the Infovision vendor exhibits and awards for the newest and best technologies, applications, products, and services in the telecommunications field. Aside from the traffic in Chicago (I spent five days there with six of my students and drove a large van around the O'Hare and downtown areas quite a bit), it was a satisfying, enjoyable, and educational trip. In addition to the conference, there are always plenty of great places to eat and lots of great music to check out in Chicago.
The conference consists of two main components. The eight in-depth, daylong TecForums take place, four to a day, on Monday and Thursday you pick one on each day. Over Tuesday and Wednesday, 62 90-minute sessions on a wide variety of topics are offered you can make six of those. Additionally, there are several conference-wide plenary sessions on the state of the industry, special sessions for faculty and students, and free lunch every day. And did I mention the Infovision exhibition hall? Dozens of service providers and equipment manufacturers are on hand to hawk their wares, give away lots of cool promotional items, and provide even more free food and drink.
NCF is a high-level and valuable event the industry executives, managers, and engineers who attend shell out (or their companies do) $2,995 to attend the full four days of TecForums and technology sessions. After all, the presenters include researchers and developers on the cutting edge of the industry and CEOs, presidents, and VPs of the major telecommunications firms in the world. Fortunately, the IEC runs a University Program whose 35 industry participants (including such luminaries as Cisco Systems, IBM, Nortel Networks, BellSouth, and Lucent Technologies) make it possible for faculty members like me to attend for a much more affordable fifty dollar fee.
Through the University Program, the IEC works to disseminate the latest industry information to its 73 domestic and international member universities (the University of Kentucky is associated through the School of Journalism and Telecommunications). The reason, of course, is because hundreds of thousands of high-tech jobs, including networking-related positions, will go unfilled this in the United States this year. The telecommunications industry and the IEC are acutely aware of that fact and are doing their best to help alleviate the problem by furthering telecommunications education. In my experience, a little of the right kind of education goes a long way. My voice and data networking students have no problem landing jobs upon graduation that are in the $35,000 to $60,000 range. And then most of them can count on their companies to pay for their various certifications.
One of the ways the IEC attempts to fulfill its mission is by mass distribution of leading-edge information that is nearly impossible to obtain otherwise. All NCF attendees are provided with CD-ROMs containing all the slide presentations from the sessions and scores of industry tutorials covering topics such as Voice over IP (Internet Protocol), wireless standards and issues, Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), and many others. The tutorials can also be accessed through the IEC's website (just in case you want to know, it's www.iec.org), which has proved to be a significant benefit for my students. Feel free to check it out it's not a restricted site.
Next month I'll relate some of the latest in telecommunications services and equipment.