The 2012 Ibuka Medal went to three people on the video standards committee for H.264/MPEG4-AVC. The 2013 award went to three on the High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding committee. For more than 20 years, the DSL Standards group has been advancing broadband from 1.5 megabits in the pre-DMT days to G.fast’s hundreds of megabits. It’s time to put together a nomination. This year's nominations are due January 31. The chair of the committee is Kenneth Wiegand of Fraunhofer, one of those who won the award for video standards. Balan Nair, also on the committee, installed millions of lines of DSL as CTO of Qwest.

The 2014 Award went to Marty Cooper, cell phone inventor and friend to many of us. Marty’s Marconi Panel in D.C. in October upended many people’s thinking about spectrum. Two dozen of the most influential in D.C. were in the audience to hear “We’ve never had a spectrum shortage and we never will.” The video is well worth watching http://bit.ly/Marconispectrum

For information on the award, http://www.ieee.org/about/awards/tfas/ibuka.html If we don’t get this together for this year, let’s make sure to do it next year.