21923 - SCTE Broadband Aug2023 COMPLETE v1 (1)

39 Vol. 45 No. 3 - September 2023 Issue from the industry time that companies didn’t want to invest in training people. In Romania, they were afraid that if they train engineers up, they would lose the people – they become qualified and head off to better opportunities overseas, either in the UK, Germany or France for example, for bigger salaries because by then they were fully qualified engineers. I was among the founders of AFOR (the Fibre Optic Association of Romania) and more recently, as president of Technical Committee 138 – Fiber Optics of ASRO, the Romanian Standards Association. I also represent Romania at CENELEC for standardisations meetings. How did you get the conference off the ground? CB: The conference was a group effort. I set the association up because I realised after contacting former colleagues that they were reluctant to engage while I was working for NetCity. It was difficult to gain any traction. When I asked what was going on, I was told that company policy prevented them from getting involved, that my Netcity credentials were causing problems. You weren’t impartial? CB: Exactly. My association with NetCity, a commercial entity, caused a conflict of interest. So it was around then that I decided to that we need an association to create an agnostic, technical community. The industry has been very good to me over the years. The conference and the museum emerged out of all that experience; I wanted to bring together the expertise and knowledge across the entire industry, take stock, look collectively at where we are and work out where we are going next. I think we achieved that and the fibre optic museum is a way to look at this growing industry.