Fixed-mobile convergence initially focused on optimizing fixed and mobile telephone infrastructure for voice services. The appearance of VoIP and smartphones, the growing popularity of social networks and video hosting services, the emerging of 5G, Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communication and ever newer over-the-top services motivated manufacturers, network operators and service providers to refocus and data delivery. The tutorial highlights the structural and functional aspects for efficiently instrumenting this convergence process, including infrastructure considerations, network function virtualization, software defined networking, unified functionality. The presentations are embedded into an overview of the past efforts, a summary of the state of the art, and a look-ahead for future communications networks. The authors are members of the Combo European consortium working on fixed-mobile convergence.

Electronic equalizers are more and more applied in optical transmission systems to compensate for static as well as time varying fiber distortions. In this paper we investigate the performance of 4-states and 16-states MLSE equalizers in 10 Gbit/s field trials over buried single mode fibers. Our results show that the MLSE equalizer enables the joint compensation of chromatic dispersion up to 4480 ps/nm and polarization mode dispersion up to 92 ps. This will increase the uncompensated transmission length and enables a more robust and flexible optical link design.

Optical systems and technologies have been radically changing the telecommunication networks for past 15 years; today wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology, optical amplifiers, and simple optical switching elements like optical add-drop multiplexers (OADMs) are used in the backbone networks of all operators worldwide. Optical systems nowadays provide the basis for cost-effective transmission of large amounts of bandwidth over the Internet, and will enable its future growth and the spreading of new applications and services. This paper summarizes the main trends in optical networking and investigates potential future application areas. Optical system technology has become so pervasive in network design that it needs to be considered in the context of provisioning new applications and services. Therefore, the analysis is not limited to the aspects of physical transmission, but also takes into account recent developments in integrated network design as well as network control and management. The following sections describe the key functionalities of future optical network architectures, and the key findings of the theoretical analysis are supported by the results of a field trial of advanced transmission technology