By Patricia Daukantas

Last week my colleagues and I finished up the final round of proofreading on the March issue of OPN and sent it off to the printer. We also held our annual planning meeting for OPN, with invitees from all around the United States as well as from Canada, France, Mexico, Russia, Turkey and Australia.

None of this was particularly unusual … except that the city of our headquarters, Washington, D.C., was sitting underneath more snow than it ever has received since modern meteorological recordkeeping began. According to the Capital Weather Gang blog on WashingtonPost.com, seasonal snow totals (including a December snowstorm) stand at 142 cm at Reagan National Airport, 186 cm at Dulles International Airport and 203 cm at Baltimore’s BWI Marshall Airport.

If the advances in fiber-optic telecommunications hadn’t happened over the last 20 years, collaborating on the magazine pages from home, as well as teleconferencing with advisers who weren’t able to get to Washington in person, would have been either impossible or prohibitively expensive.

So, here’s a salute to all of our OPN readers and OSA members who have contributed to the world of optical fiber communications. Thank you very much! And because of you, everyone will get to enjoy the March OPN as if no bad weather ever happened here.

2010-02 February fiber optics, telecommunications, osa