Mike Talbert, of Verizon, and Ding Hai, of China Unicom, are also joining the Broadband Forum’s 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.
“Broadband Forum has always worked closely with operators across the globe, as they provide us with unique insight into what is important for the industry and ensure that our work remains at the cutting-edge,” said John Blackford, chairman of Broadband Forum.
“These latest board appointments build upon that collaboration as we come to the beginning of an incredibly exciting period for Broadband Forum. 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.”
Announced the Forum’s Q3 meeting, a number of new developments were also shared. For example, the Broadband User Services Work Area is collaborating with 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.
In addition, the Open Broadband – Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA) project team completed 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.
