In an era where technology trends are dominated by AI, cloud computing, and software development, network engineering—the backbone of our digital infrastructure—has fallen from the spotlight. This keynote addresses the critical challenge of attracting and developing the next generation of network engineers while making sure current teams remain competitive in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Drawing from real-world experience and industry trends, we'll explore effective strategies for making network engineering appealing to young talent, demonstrate practical approaches for mentorship and skill development of early in career engineers, and discuss how to bridge the gap between classical networking fundamentals and emerging technologies. IT leaders and senior engineers will leave with actionable frameworks for talent development and concrete methods to showcase the continuing relevance and excitement of network engineering in today's technology landscape.

This talk outlines current IETF activities on modelling, use-cases, and control of “small form factor coherent optical pluggables” inside packet devices (Routers), encapsulating all significant properties of optical pluggable. It further delves into initiatives related to use-cases driven by network operators and multi-layer multi-vendor SDN controller for such network.

Various standard organizations like IETF, OpenConfig, OIF, ITU-T, T-API, and TIP have started addressing this. The IETF's objective is to scrutinize the work of these standardization bodies, focusing on capabilities, configuration, and telemetry data of the packet over optical network to establish a comprehensive set of pluggable attributes. The goals also include various options for life cycle management of coherent pluggable in a multi-vendor multi-layer IP over DWDM networks.

This presentation will given an overview of testing methodologies and how they can be applied to network operational use-cases. A live-ish demo will be used to highlight how operators can use open-source, Python testing frameworks to codify and pipeline network changes and improve success rates with declarative, repeatable and reliable testing processes.

About how I tested with open source tools and tried something else while searching for a solution to one problem

A simple deck that breaks down the basic components that make up a submarine cable system.

We seen to have lost our way - some twenty years ago there was a clear common purpose that we were performing a transition to take the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6. The registry stocks of free IPv4 addresses had been depleted and the Internet was clearly running on empty. The projections of growth in digital devices were unrelenting and the introduction of mobile devices such as the iPhone increased the urgency of this transition. Only IPv6 could save the Internet.

Twenty years later we are still in transition. IPv4 remains the dominant IP protocol for the majority of the Internet's users and few if any large scale service providers are ready to move to an IPv6-only platform. It seems that we have settled down to operate a dual-stack Internet that is permanently 'in transition'. How did we end up at this unexpected place? Why has IPv4 lasted way past any rational expectation of its useful lifetime? How has the architecture Internet changed such that any urgency of this IPv6 transition has largely abated? This presentation will explore some possible answers to these questions and in so doing will raise some deeper and somewhat scarier questions about the future of public digital networks that underpin the digital world's communications needs.