The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) recently bestowed CommScoppe fellow Paul Kolesar with the IEC 1906 Award for Kolesar's contributions to IEC's work and to the electrotechnical industry as a whole. Kolesar is one of 15 individuals from the United States who received the IEC 1906 Award this year. The IEC is relevant to the structured cabling industry because in collaboration with the International Organization for Standardizatio (ISO), the IEC establishes cabling-system performance standards including ISO/IEC-11801. Kolesar has been a significant contributor to the development of standards covering OM3 and OM4 multimode fiber.
The 1906 award was established in 2004 and is named for the year in which the IEC was founded. Kolesar has been an active member of SC86A/WG1 (optical fibers) for a number of years. He has also been active in SC86B/WG4 (connectors) and SC86C/WG1 (systems).
This is the second significant professional accomplishment for Kolesar in 2011. Earlier in the year, he was promoted to the position of fellow within CommScope. According to the company, being named a fellow is "the highest level of professional achievement for CommScope's engineering and technical employees."
Of receiving the IEC 1906 Award, Kolesar said, "I'm honored by this acknowledgement of my efforts for advancing the industry. This award highlights not only my efforts, but also CommScope's vision for Living Infrastructure that has enabled our customers to deploy solutions that become standards in the future."
CommScope's senior vice president for enterprise product line management, George Brooks, praised Kolesar's work in helping to establish the company's LazrSpeed and InstaPatch product lines, saying that Paul's contributions "have paved the way for market leadership of highly flexible solutions, extending the useful life of multimode fiber over the past decade and into the next. He has played a key role in the tremendous growth and the rapid proliferation of fiber-optic solutions in the past several years," Brooks said.
Note: Shortly after specifications for OM4 fiber were finalized, Paul Kolesar authored the article entitled "OM4 fiber cabling standard for next-generation data centers" - one of many articles he has written. You can read the article here.