Meet the Speakers

Dr. Ali Mohamed Ahmed is an executive with more than 20 years of technology and engineering leadership experience with major, publicly listed, telecommunications companies worldwide including in North America with Rogers Communications and in Europe with UPC in Poland, iesy/UnityMedia in Germany, MoscowCableCom in Russia and News Corp Europe in the UK.
He also has provided technology expertise and advice to Private Equity & Venture Capital companies including Apax Partners, Goldman Sachs, and Columbus Nova.

Gwenn Amice currently holds the position of Subject Matter Expert with EXFO, focusing on next-generation optical network in charge of technical seminars, training, support and technical advice to EXFO’s customers.
Mr. Amice holds a university degree in electrical engineering and industrial computing.
He is a member of the Broadband Forum Americas Technology Committee

Cameron Barrett is the Chief Executive Officer of Field Safe Solutions. Previously, Cameron held several executive positions, including Vice President of Government and Carrier Services at Axia Netmedia Inc. and President of CSC Canada. He joined Field Safe Solutions following a 20-year career as an international technology, sales and operational executive in industry-leading technology companies.

Prasad Bhandaru is the Wireless Program manager at Cyient. He lives in Reston, Virginia, and has around 15 years of experience in the field of RF Engineering, Sales and Operations with major wireless carriers across the US.
Prasad's team is responsible for 4G/5G communications projects and Customer relationships in this space. In-sync with sales and delivery, they are responsible for solutions

Over the past 18 years, Mohamed has held several key positions at FONEX. Currently he is responsible for the managed business services portfolio focusing on vertical markets that include Service Providers and Utilities. Mohamed has a strong knowledge base and experience in Carrier Ethernet networks with focus on SDNN/NFV, service assurance, legacy migration and cyber security.
Mohamed holds a Bachelor of Computer Engineering from Concordia University and MBA from the John Molson School of Business.

Steve is a respected international subject matter expert and thought leader in telecommunications, high tech and information technology systems engineering with a proven track record of success; Success that has facilitated increased revenue for cable service providers, solved business challenges and enhanced the subscriber experience. At SCTE·ISBE he is responsible for the tremendous growth of training content, boot camps and certification programs for over 100,000 telecommunication professionals in the areas of Fiber Deep, DAA, FTTx, DOCSIS, Wi-Fi, routing, switching, virtualization, IPv6, Ethernet, Business Services, MPEG, Linux, Headend, installation and outside plant/HFC. His signature skill is a dynamic, personable and enthusiastic approach to the delivery of highly complex technical content from the boots to suits for fast-paced companies.

Ron’s career in the CATV industry began 25 years ago in construction, for a local cable company. He joined Cogeco Cable in 1998 as a Service Technician, gaining exposure to the MSO’s interdependence of maintenance, construction, headend/data departments, and planning.
Ron has been a member of SCTE for 15 years and in 2013 he was elected to the Ontario Board. He served as President for two years. Recently Ron joined Telonix Communications as Technical Manager Broadband. His main role is supporting the company’s RF products.

François Marcotte is a senior engineer currently working for EXFO in Montreal, Canada. Francois has been testing networks since 1990. He has developed solid expertise in Optical transport, Ethernet and IP. Francois is working with clients to improve testing methods and processes. He is a regular speaker in various seminars in North America.

Tushar Mathur is a Staff Systems Engineer in the Chief Technology Office – Network Solutions at CommScope, where he has been working for the past 4 years on defining the architecture of the ARRIS centralized and distributed CCAP/CMTS systems. His current areas of interest are QoS and Distributed Access Architecture. He has issued and pending patents and has authored several papers on emerging broadband technologies. Prior to working at CommScope, Tushar has worked as a Software Engineer at Motorola Solutions Inc. on Wi-Fi APs and Controllers. Tushar holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Miami University, OH, USA.

Thomas Schroer is Senior Director of Services Marketing for Calix, where he evangelizes its wide array of Professional, Managed, Education and Success Services. Prior to that he was accumulating extensive experience in service provider planning, engineering and operations as well as marketing for network and service assurance, and core and access solutions.

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Brian Teague has over 20 years' experience in the fiber optics industry with a focus on inspection and cleaning fiber optic connectors. Brian’s current role as Product Line Manager at Senko includes developing processes to helping customers with recommendations for solving problems with the optical interconnects.

Barry Walton is a Solutions Architect for Corning Optical Communications working with customers to deploy FTTH networks utilizing his extensive experience gained from 41 years in Telecom. He joined Corning after 37 years at a large tier 1 telecom company in Canada where he championed the deployment of FTTH, providing the strategy and planning for over 1 million homes passed. Barry’s expertise lies in business case creation, operations planning, large-scale network planning, reducing costs, increasing build pace and deployment strategy for successful access network builds. A former board member of the North American Fiber to the Home Council, Barry has delivered numerous FTTH presentations at many national and regional conferences. He is highly respected by his peers for his expertise gained through real-world FTTH network deployments. Barry is a very passionate FTTH evangelist.
Barry resides in New Brunswick Canada.