John Cioffi is a born and bred Illinoisan, from a young age he gravitated towards education in technology taking him from to earning his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1978. Soon leaving his home, he began working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he began his long career designing modems, one of many technologies he revolutionized. Never one to shy away from his education while at Bell Laboratories, he also attended Stanford University, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering.

Quickly becoming an educator at Stanford, taking his first role as an assistant professor. Many of his peers over a few years’ there would soon become partners and employees. Cioffi at 35 years old was ready to make his own mark on the world, taking a leave of absence from his studies to found Amati Communications Corporation. His primary goal was to build DSL modems stemming from the work his team had accomplished at Stanford. With Cioffi at the helm, Amati built the Prelude modem, the DSL modem that brought his group mainstream prominence cementing their place in the industry. Prelude was revolutionary, transmitting 6+ megabits per second over 9,000 feet of telephone line – a far cry from the gigabits per second available to homes today. Prelude represented a significant upgrade to win their start-up the “Bellcore ADSL Olympics” by outperforming modems from much larger competitors such as Bellcore and AT&T.

The world quickly took notice of Dr. Cioffi. In 1997, Texas Instruments acquired Amanti seven years after it was founded for $395 million. Having set a precedent for DSL, Cioffi now set his sights on improving further on his innovations with dynamic spectrum management technology. This improvement allowed DSL lines to run more reliably and with faster data rates. I’m sure most of you reading remember living through the late 90’s/early 00’s and how quickly speeds and processing progressed year by year. We owe a large part of these upgrades to Cioffi. A list of Cioffi’s accolades and awards from his work include…

• IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal
• The Economist Innovation Award – Computing and Telecommunications
• IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award
• Outstanding Achievement Award, American National Standards Institute for contributions to ADSL
• Hitachi Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, where he held a tenured endowed professorship before retiring after 22 full-time years

Hundreds of millions of people use DSL based on Amanti’s initial groundbreaking innovations. Cioffi and his teams should be lauded for their inventiveness and leadership in designing the world’s first ADSL & VDSL modems, which today account for roughly 98% of the 400 million DSL connections worldwide. Especially notable Cioffi’s pioneering research in making digital subscriber line (DSL) technology practical and has led to over 400 publications and more than 100 pending or issued patents, many of which are licensed. Cioffi persists just as he did from the start: An upstart kid from a small-town Park Forest become a leader in our industry. Now the Chairman and CEO of ASSIA Inc., a California-based company. ASSIA is known for pioneering DSL management software sold to DSL service providers, and specifically for introducing Dynamic Spectrum Management or DSM.

And of course, there is much more to “The father of DSL” and his legacy that we may revisit in the future, but this concludes this month’s feature in the “Luminaries in Telecom” series. Please feel free to add to the conversation! Had you heard of Dr. John M. Cioffi before? What did you take away from his incredible innovations and pursuits that changed the world of telecom? Sound off in the comments below with any fun facts/specifics that may have been missed! Any suggestions for a person in Telecom history you think deserves a feature send a message to [email protected]. We at NJFX hope you’ve gleaned a bit of inspiration to take with you through the rest of your week!

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Our General Manager, Felix Seda, is part of the PTC Advisory Council leading the new PTC Beyond Initiative, helping empower the next generation of industry leaders. The initiative will be supported throughout the conference with a complete program of activities and providing them a seat at the table.

NJFX is proud to kick off the conference with the Zellenials in Telecom Welcome Reception! 

PTC ’23 Welcome Reception is geared towards fostering and developing young leaders in the telecommunications industry. The event will provide a space for young individuals within the industry the chance to network with their peers as well as industry professionals to better establish their telecom knowledge and contacts.

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Securing the Future

On November 8, 2022, twenty-three new hires of network engineers from AT&T toured the NJFX CLS colocation campus. The visit included sessions on subsea history and insight into the Northeast traditional carrier hotel infrastructure with our General Manager, Felix Seda, and CEO, Gil Santaliz.  Many of the recent college graduates supporting AT&T’s US Mobile, Wireline, and Global IP networks were offered their positions at AT&T prior to graduating from their universities in an effort to secure the best-talented engineers.

NJFX educated recent graduates on how 97% of the world’s internet traffic flows through cable landing stations and subsea cables. They learned how we have 14 cables supporting traffic across the Atlantic and how more than half will be retiring because of enhancements in technology.

Felix Seda said,” Our industry has a very promising future ahead of it, and there are lots of opportunities for young people to become involved, learn, develop important connections, and start what might turn out to be a highly lucrative and long-lasting career.”

Leading the Community

It has been increasingly clear in recent years that there is a war for talent in the telecommunications industry. NJFX has pioneered efforts to develop events that educate young professionals in the telecommunications industry about the sector’s importance and the value of building a career in this community.

We see organizations like PTC, Capacity, Carrier Community, and more taking charge of constructing a more inclusive industry.  NJFX aims to actively keeping the industry aware of the benefits of hiring young talent and proceeding to host events that highlight and develop the younger workforce.

The NJFX Team has been actively leading events for young talent to have a seat at the table with industry veterans. For years, NJFX has encouraged young generations to consider a career in the industry and has created initiatives to help close the talent gap.

Powered by the Past

This past year NJFX has been an active pillar in educating, mentoring, and inspiring young professional leaders in the telecommunication sector. A discussion was led at ITW 2022 about plugging the talent gap with NJFX,  Telstra, and Sequential Tech. The forum was an open roundtable discussion about the industry’s challenges with recruitment, the retirement cliff, women in the industry, and countering implicit bias in recruitment.

Efforts do not stop with roundtable discussions, there needs to be action put into place that allows young professionals to experience conferences and build their professional network. The PTC Advisory Council, which includes Felix Seda, agreed and has created a Buy One Get One Free admission to this upcoming PTC ’23 conference. This is a huge step in the right direction for young professionals to understand the business and actively network in person.

NJFX famously hosts a reception at PTC every year that joins young talent in the industry and industry leaders to discuss the past and empower the future. The classic event has become a staple of the PTC conference exploring new innovative ways to attract newcomers and raise awareness

WALL TOWNSHIP, NJ – This month we’re spotlighting our first (of many) leading female features, the trailblazing Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson! Featured in the National Women’s Hall of Fame, she’s been an ideal role model for women in science and academia worldwide for decades. Like previously featured Luminaries, Dr. Jackson’s innovations in physics caused ripple effects in multiple industries, including telecom. After learning more about Dr. Jackson in today’s feature I’m sure you will want to sing the praises of this amazing woman!

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Dr. Jackson was born and raised in Washington DC, an especially important location later in her career. During her high school years in the 1960s, she was especially perceived as an outlier, being a young woman so intensely excelling that the principal for the boys at her high school mentored her to pursue the sciences. Having graduated as her high school’s Valedictorian, she made history as being among the first African Americans to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most elite science and engineering universities worldwide and a hub of modern technology. Dr. Jackson exemplifies this by being the first Black female to receive a doctorate in theoretical solid-state physics from MIT in 1973.

The new PhD. research landed her a position as a visiting science associate at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. Her work on subatomic particles there served as a springboard back home to DC, where she studied theoretical physics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. She managed this while also being elected to MIT Corporation’s Board of Trustees only 3 years after graduating! Fast forward a bit and now your ears may perk, as her contributions to telecom industry began soon after taking a position at the iconic Bell Labs, which drew the best and brightest researchers from everywhere. Here, Dr. Jackson began conducting experiments focusing on the electronic properties of ceramic materials in hopes that they could act as superconductors of electric currents.

Her breakthroughs in physics are involved with much of what we now know in telecommunications and were instrumental in paving the way towards advancements in multiple technologies we continue to use today:  the portable fax, touch-tone telephone, solar cells, fiber optic cables, and technology behind caller ID and call waiting to name a few. Dr. Jackson had quite memorable a time at Bell Laboratories, where she met her future husband, fellow physicist Dr. Morris A. Washington. While working at Bell Labs and becoming a widely trusted expert in her field, she then took the honorable mantle of educator as she was appointed professor of physics at Rutgers University. She became a mentor and set an example for women in sciences by sharing her experiences with young minds from all over the world.

Proving this further, Dr. Jackson went on to accumulate accolades galore, taking many positions in her illustrious career:

• President of The Society of Black Physicists
• Member of the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology
• President Clinton named her Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
• Inductee of National Women’s Hall of Fame

Dr. Jackson led the formation of the International Nuclear Regulators Association. In addition to these titles and accolades, she became the eighteenth president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Here Dr. Jackson remains a beacon for women and minorities in the sciences. She has been using her status by bringing much-needed attention to the ongoing “Quiet Crisis” of America’s predicted inability to innovate in the face of a looming scientific workforce shortage. As an especially important representative being an empowered and impassioned woman in science at the top of her field, Dr. Jackson has voiced her goal for Rensselaer: “To achieve prominence in the 21st century as a top-tier world-class technological research university, with global reach and global impact.”

And of course, there is much more to Dr. Jackson’s story that we may tell in the future, but this concludes this month’s feature in the “Luminaries in Telecom” series. Please feel free to add to the conversation! Had you heard of Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson before? What did you take away from her pursuits? Sound off in the comments below with any fun facts/specifics that may have been missed! Any suggestions for a person in Telecom history you think deserves a feature send a message to [email protected]. We at NJFX hope you’ve gleaned a bit of inspiration to take with you through the rest of your week!

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