Presentation: The Deployment Gap: What's Holding Fibre Back?#

Andrew Black, Technical Director - Fujikura Europe Ltd

• Why: The only speaker in the program from an actual fibre/cable component manufacturer in a technical-director role — likely the closest thing to a physical-layer talk on offer. The topic is deployment friction (cost, labour, modernisation) rather than DC-specific fibre, but the constraints discussed shape every build the PM touches.
• What: As operators move from rollout plans to large-scale delivery, the emerging problems are cost, complexity, labour availability, and network modernisation; the talk covers practical deployment realities and lessons across European markets (from abstract only).
• How: Practitioner overview of deployment practice — likely splicing/cabling logistics, labour scaling, and modernisation trade-offs, given the speaker's background.
• Where applicable: European fibre deployment generally; the abstract does not specify DC or long-haul focus, so applicability to DC-specific cabling is uncertain.