BCE Keeps Austin Awesome

AUSTIN, Texas -- Big Communications Event -- Light Reading's BCE returned to Austin, Texas again this year and attendees heard from a range of industry thought-leaders who delivered context and clarity to the software-driven future.

The event kicked off on Monday with workshops from MEF, Women in Comms, an OCP Telco Engineering workshop, OPNFV workshop and the Broadband Summit. Monday night attendees congratulated winners at the Leading Lights Awards, which was held at Brazos Hall. (See Leading Lights 2017: The Winners.)

The event was in full swing on Tuesday, beginning with a keynote address by Light Reading's Founder Steve Saunders, followed by Aamir Hussain, executive vice president and chief technology officer at CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL), who said the industry transformation underway is so significant that it's as if telcos are "changing the engine of the plane midflight," and they must harness the power of the digital disruption by making the network smarter and by leveraging partnerships.

On Tuesday, John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president of Technology & Operations for AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), delivered a keynote and explained the importance of leveraging open source to "move quickly at scale" and stay a step ahead of the competition. George Reed, senior vice president of solutions and marketing for Huawei, delivered a breakout session later in the afternoon that focused on opportunities for telcos to develop new revenue streams in the narrowband and low-power wireless Internet of Things (IoT) market.

On Wednesday morning, BCE attendees learned more about the latest developments in Facebook's Telecom Infra Project (TIP) during a keynote by Hans-Juergen Schmidtke, director of the Engineering and Infrastructure Foundation at Facebook.

"There are a variety of technologies we're looking at right now that allow us to drive this connectivity paradigm into application spaces that we believe were mostly neglected in the last years or decades," he said.

And as always, there was also plenty of time to celebrate -- the BCE kickoff party Tuesday night was held at Austin's famous Container Bar which featured live music, an open bar and Tex Mex at the food truck.

Take a look at this Telco Transformation slideshow from Austin to see some highlights from this year's BCE.

CenturyLink's Aamir Hussain

CenturLink's Aamir Hussain delivered a keynote on Tuesday, and stressed the pursuit of simplification, transforming the customer experience, leveraging partnerships and strengthening security to harness the power of the digital disruption.

For more from BCE see:

• AT&T's Donovan on Squashing the Debate Society
• How BT Learned to Love 4K
• Making Fat Video Fit
• Facebook's Schmidtke on TIP & the New Connectivity Paradigm