Broadband Forum has further strengthened its board of directors, welcoming two new operators – Verizon and China Unicom – as its work to develop and standardize next-generation broadband services continues.
Mike Talbert, of Verizon, and Ding Hai, of China Unicom, are the latest members to join the board which includes representatives from BT, Calix, CommScope, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Huawei Technologies, InCoax, MaxLinear, Nokia, and Telecom Italia.
Their appointments follow the retirement of Broadband Forum President Tom Starr, of AT&T, who has held a Board position for 26 years. He is succeeded by Bernd Hesse, of Calix.
The new board members were named during Broadband Forum’s virtual Q3 meeting, where several projects around 5G and the Connected Home moved forward, and a new Open Broadband project around measurement of gigabit broadband speeds was launched.
The Forum’s Q3 meeting saw a number of developments. The Broadband User Services Work Area is working alongside the prpl Foundation to explore how using USP can create interoperable smart gateways that provide application developers with an easy way to build new services to operate on the gateway. The Open Broadband – Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA) project team finalized its fourth major release of its reference implementation of the CloudCO's BAA layer which enables vendors to provide support for white box implementations for various types of access nodes using either standard adapters or via vendor specific adapters, while the OB-USP-Agent Work Area’s Canary Release is nearing completion. This release focuses on providing support for MQTT and Architecture improvements to better support OpenWRT/prplWRT and RDK-based implementations. The Physical Layer Transmission Work Area published its Test Plan related to Reverse Power Feed (TR-338), which specifies a set of test cases and related pass or fail requirements for reverse powering of remote network nodes from customer premises equipment.
Broadband Forum Chairman John Blackford
We are continuing to make great strides in 5G convergence, our User Services Platform (USP) efforts are continuing to gain momentum, and we have a new open source project launching that could be a true game changer for gigabit broadband.
