Broadband Forum Presents Standardization for the Virtualized Multi-Service Broadband Network

March 6, 2015, Shenzhen, China – This week’s annual Broadband Forum meeting in Shenzhen, China, sponsored by Huawei Technologies, covered important work to bring practical deployment of virtualized solutions to the broadband network.

“While the industry has been focused on the building blocks for virtualizing the data center, the Broadband Forum has been busy creating practical implementations for the broadband network,” said Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum. “The broadband market is again an extremely active area of the market. In fact there have been a staggering 1000+ technical contributions over our last year reflecting new market requirements and profound changes in service delivery.”

The new work is being delivered in the form of a series of standards (technical and marketing reports) covering SDN and NFV and programmability in the Multi-Service Broadband Network, FTTdp management, fixed access network sharing, hybrid access for broadband networks and TR-069 development.

As part of this forward-looking initiative, the Forum has elected Michael Fargano (CenturyLink) as new Technical Committee Chair to spearhead the development of innovative technical standards required for software defined virtualized networking.

To further support the strategy, the Forum has appointed William Lupton (contracted with Honu Ltd) as Software Architect. Lupton will lead the Software Group to create future document structures for the Forum’s NFV and SDN activities and leverage his many years of involvement with the Forum and extensive software development experience. Additionally, Mark Fishburn (contracted with MarketWord) is working with the Forum on strategic marketing, positioning and messaging as we address this changing market.

To coincide with these developments, the Forum elected its 2015 Board members at the Q1 meeting, which includes Tom Starr (AT&T), Lowell Lamb (Broadcom Corp.), Manuel Paul (Deutsche Telekom), and Les Brown (Huawei Technologies). Kevin Foster (BT) and Thomas Starr (AT&T) were re-appointed as Chairman and President, respectively, of the Forum.

Shenzhen also provided the Forum with the opportunity to present its dedicated members with a number of awards in recognition of their commitment to the Forum and industry as a whole. This included Christophe Alter (Orange), who was presented with the Leadership Award for his longstanding service to the Forum, both as a Board member and the Technical Committee Chair.

The Circle of Excellence Award, which recognizes individuals who have gone above and beyond the call of duty and who have changed the face of broadband, was presented to Hongyu Li (Huawei Technologies) and Scott Mansfield (Ericsson). Hongyu Li has been instrumental in the completion of key multi-service architecture work and progressing SDN virtualization efforts, while Scott Mansfield has been key in driving the Forum’s MPLS in carrier Ethernet work, while acting as a strategic liaison aligning the Forum and the MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum) recommendations.

Outstanding Contributor Awards, which recognize the most valuable contributors in 2014, were given to Ken Ko (ADTRAN), Ken Kerpez (ASSIA), David Thorne (BT), Martin Casey (Calix), Diane Patton (Cisco Systems), and Junwei Xia (Huawei Technologies).

Echoing the new orientation plans, the meeting welcomed Mrs. Duo Liu, Vice President, CATR, MIIT of China/Operation Director of SDN Industry Alliance, who delivered a keynote, focusing on the importance of collaborating to drive SDN forward, particularly for SDN network architecture, SDN controller platforms, interfaces, scenarios and solutions, and the evolution from existing networks to SDN.