NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Jan 24, 2017) - Light Reading's (www.lightreading.com) Big Communications Event (www.bigcommunicationsevent.com) is heading back to Austin, Texas, on May 15-17. Light Reading's Big Communications Event (BCE) is the ONE event that unites next-gen communications providers for real-world discussions of the issues critical to their future, including virtualization, cloud, next-gen wireless and back office transformation.

The Big Communications Event brings together the industry's top network operators with its most dynamic technologists to discuss and debate the issues both driving and challenging the ultimate move to an NFV-enabled cloud running profitable applications and services over an underlying New IP network. BCE also once again features a demo floor including live demos from the world's leading vendors as well as a Live Interoperability Demo from the New IP Agency.

The Big Communications Event showcases hundreds of speakers who are the leading minds in the next-gen communications ecosystem. A stellar keynote line-up on May 16 and May 17 includes the following renowned industry thought leaders:

KEYNOTES:

• John Donovan, Chief Strategy Officer & Group President, AT&T Technology & Operations
• Aamir Hussain, CTO & Executive Vice President, CenturyLink
• Ed Chan, Senior Vice President, Network Infrastructure Planning, Verizon

KEYNOTE PANELISTS:

• Andrew Dugan, CTO, Level 3 Communications
• Don MacNeil, CTO, EdgeConnex
• Chris Rice, Senior Vice President, AT&T Labs, Domain 2.0 Architecture & Design
• Ron Marquardt, Vice President, Technology, Sprint

"At BCE, we are bringing together the industry's top experts focused on the transformation from legacy networks to virtualized networks that can scale to meet future bandwidth demand," says Carol Wilson, BCE conference chair and Light Reading's editor-at-large. "CSPs are quickly moving into the implementation stage of the software-defined ecosystem and face both unprecedented challenges and huge business opportunities. BCE is the one industry-wide event where industry professionals can look beyond the technical challenges to solving for the business case in virtualized environments."

This year's Big Communications Event will also be collocated with 5G North America, which brings together leading carriers, content providers, solution providers and the enterprise IoT market to determine and define requirements, visions and expectations for 5G networks.

For the second year in a row, the Big Communications Event will also feature a Women in Comms luncheon and workshop on May 15. These sessions will explore the challenges and opportunities for women in the next-gen comms industry. This workshop is open to all men and women in the communications field and related industries, as well as college students, recent graduates and those interested in science, technology, engineering, math (STEM); telecom, information and communications technologies (ICT); computer science; and next-gen communications.

The Big Communications Event is sponsored by super platinum sponsor Intel; platinum sponsors ADVA Optical Networking, Huawei and NETSCOUT; gold sponsors Canoga Perkins, Corero, ECI, MoSys, MRV Communications, Procera Networks and Verimatrix; silver sponsors ADTRAN and Allot Communications; and demo sponsors Atrinet, Lanner, Omnitron Systems Technology and Parallel Wireless.

Speaking, sponsorship, workshop and partner opportunities are available. For more information, contact events@lightreading.com.

To view the full BCE 2017 agenda, click here. To register to attend, click here.

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About Light Reading

Light Reading (www.lightreading.com) combines its research-led online communities and targeted events portfolio to help those in the global communications industry make informed decisions. Lightreading.com is the ultimate source for telecom analysis for more than 400,000 subscribers each month, leading the media sector in terms of traffic, content and reputation. Light Reading produces targeted communications events and focused one-day conferences each year for cable, mobile and wireline executives across five continents.