Jean-Loup Ferrant graduated as an electronic engineer from the National Polytechnique Institute of 
Grenoble (INPG) in 1974 and joined CIT Alcatel in 1975.
He first worked on the last 60MHz analogue system for transmission over coaxial cables before switching to digital systems where he was responsible for the development of a new generation of 2 Mbit/s PCM equipment based on combos and gate arrays. In 1985, he went to Newport, Rhode Island, for 6 months to an Alcatel subsidiary to work on a T1 system.
Back in France in 1986, he was responsible for the hardware of a digital cross-connect system and then joined the system group in charge of SDH cross-connects responsible for the synchronisation aspects of SDH. In 1991 Jean-Loup started representing Alcatel in standardization committees dealing with SDH in general, but focusing on synchronisation aspects. He was active in in ITU-T SG15, SG18, ETSI TM1, TM3 and editor in TM1, where he presented many contributions. He also participated in several IEEE meetings dealing with the definition of the 10G WAN. In parallel with the standard activity, he was responsible for the synchronisation tests on the new SDH Alcatel network integration platform.
In 2001 he was nominated rapporteur of SG15 Q13 on network synchronisation and continued sharing his activity between ITU-T standards and the SDH Alcatel integration platform. In 2004 he joined ITSF and became member of the ITSF steering committee and also participated in WSTS for many years until 2014. From 2005 to 2009 he was head of the French delegation at ITU-T SG15. In 2007 he was nominated into the Alcatel Technical Academy. Jean-Loup also participated in the IETF meetings in the Tictoc group from 2007 to 2009.
He retired from Alcatel-Lucent in 2009 and thanks to Calnex founder, Tommy Cook, he was able to continue being rapporteur of ITU-T Q13, focussing on the new activity of synchronisation over packet networks which he started a few years before. With several friends of Q13, he published several articles in the IEEE Communication Magazine and a book on synchronisation over packet networks with ISTE. At the end of 2014 Jean-Loup resigned from Q13 and the ITSF steering committee and enjoys retirement in the South of France.