Nearly 6500 telecom professionals from 120 countries attended Broadband World Forum Europe, held last week at CNIT La Défense, Paris. Sixty service providers and 100 equipment vendors also participated in the event, organized by the International Engineering Consortium (IEC) and sponsored by France Telecom. IEC President John Janowiak said, "It's satisfying to know we've created a rich marketplace for broadband opportunities in Europe. Exemplifying this is the strong exhibitor response in re-bookings. We sold out 95 percent of next year's exhibition floor in Berlin, Germany, before the show ended last week." Show sponsors presented leading-edge technologies on the exhibition floor. In addition to France Telecom, they included: Alcatel, Siemens, Accenture, Ericsson, Huawei, Cisco Systems, ECI, Italtel, Keymile, Motorola, NEC, PacketFront, ZTE, ADVA, AVM, Nokia, Pirelli, Tellabs, Visionael, Texas Instruments, Operax, radialpoint and Redback Networks. Keynote speakers were Didier Lombard, chairman and CEO, France Telecom Group; Francois Loos, minister delegate for Industry France; Alain Maloberti, vice president, Network Architectures and Design, France Telecom Group; Mike Quigley, president and COO, Alcatel; Jong-Lok Yoon, senior executive vice president, Research and Development Group, Korea Telecom. In addition to its focus on broadband, the event included the WiMAX Global ComForum, devoted to the technology and business challenges in implementing WiMAX wireless broadband networks for fixed-wireless access and mobile broadband. The InfoVision Awards presented at the show recognizing broadband innovators, products, services and applications. For more information, visit: www.iec.org/events/2006/bbwf/