WiC Leading Lights 2018 Finalists: Female Tech Pioneer of the Year

Que Sera Sarah Sarah Thomas, Director, Women in Comms 5/9/2018

The 2018 finalist list for the Hedy Lamarr Female Tech Pioneer of the Year was both cable heavy and heavy-hitter heavy. Even if you don't know the names of the women who made the list, you definitely know the technologies they are responsible for, many of which are already changing the game in the comms industry.

These five women are leading the way in cable broadband, open source, optical networking, video services and more. They are shaping today's networks and services and building the technologies to prepare them for the tomorrow's. They're responsible for a number of industry firsts in the past year -- new services, network technologies and big M&A -- and they're names you'll want to know as the innovation shows no signs of slowing.

These three WiC awards are part of the broader Leading Lights Awards program. Learn the names of the other WiC finalists and find out which companies were shortlisted in the other myriad categories by reading: WiC Leading Lights 2018 Finalists: Female-Led Startup to Watch, WiC Leading Lights 2018 Finalists: Most Inspiring Woman in Comms and Leading Lights 2018: The Finalists.

The winners, and the identities of this year's Light Reading Hall of Fame inductees, will be announced at the Leading Lights awards dinner, which will be held during the evening of Monday, May 14, at the Brazos Hall in Austin, Texas, after Women in Comms' luncheon workshop on where "digital transformation meets diversity" and the evening before the doors open to the Big Communications Event.

Be sure to book your seat or table before they sell out. All the details and contacts you need can be found right here.

Join Women in Comms for an afternoon of workshops and networking in Austin at the fifth-annual Big Communications Event on May 14. Learn from and engage with industry thought leaders and women in tech. There's still time to register and the workshop is free!”

Now, on to the finalists...

Dr. Jennifer Andreoli-Fang, Distinguished Technologist, CableLabs
Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, more commonly known as DOCSIS 3.1, and its latest update, Full Duplex DOCSIS, has been a critical innovation for the cable industry in the past year, as it improves high speed Internet access to homes and businesses. CableLabs Distinguished Technologist Dr. Jennifer Andreoli-Fang has been instrumental to the launch of both. Andreoli-Fang has had an incredible influence on both the cable broadband and wireless industries through her work on unlicensed mobile technologies, LTE and cable WiFi.

In addition to DOCSIS, Andreoli-Fang has spent the past year spearheading a project to enable cable networks for mobile backhaul. She developed technology that improves the latency on cable data networks to ensure a seamless user experience at the cell edge when cable is used as mobile backhaul. The technology, still in development today, will be deployable next year in time for the first 5G deployments, alongside an expected influx in 4G small cells.

As part of this project, and the many others she's involved with, Andreoli-Fang has been granted several patents in the past year, bringing her lifetime total to 49... and counting.

Darcy Antonellis, CEO, Vubiquity
There are 224 million reasons former Warner Bros President Technical Operations and CTO and CEO of Vubiquity Inc. Darcy Antonelli is a finalist in the Tech Pioneer of the Year category. Okay, $224 million is the price tag she garnered for the sale of Vubuiqity to Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX) in January of this year, but the technology and business she's built is equally as impressive as the sale.

Vubiquity works with more than 600 content owners to provide premium content services and video to more than 100 million customers across 120 countries and in 80 languages. The company is at the heart of the trend of operators adding content to their offerings. Vubiquity lets large distributors acquire new content, expand their offerings and outsource functions and it helps emerging distributors deliver end-to-end content services while offloading their IT and operations in a managed services model. Antonellis also convinced the cable and broadband world to bring gaming, local language programming and more over-the-top content to their platforms.

Now a part of Amdocs, Antonellis is helping build the Amdocs Media group and is bringing her video expertise to the communications world.

Next Page: Amdocs' Alla Goldner, Comcast Business' Denise Hasty, Ciena's Helen Xenos

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