Broadband Forum Celebrates Record Year at Final Meeting of 2010

2010 noted as a year of great Forum productivity, critical specifications development, powerful new alliances and the achievement of an amazing industry milestone of 500 million broadband subscribers

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 16, 2010 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Broadband Forum's fourth quarter meeting marks the culmination of a remarkable year. The California meeting had the highest attendance of members and guests in recent years, and addressed an unprecedented level of contributions for technical reports, white papers and tutorials.  Coming out of the meeting with the approval of eleven Technical Reports and a new white paper, the Forum also marked the passing of the torch from long term Technical Chairman Gavin Young of C&W to Christophe Alter of France Telecom Orange.

Noting the record number of 11 technical reports published from a single event; the new specifications ranged from IPv6 to TR-069 Software Module Management to DSL Quality Management, demonstrating the breadth and scope of the Broadband Forum's work in 2010.  The new white paper on Unified MPLS was also issued and a promising new work item, hybrid fiber-copper solutions for 4th Generation Broadband (4GBB), was introduced at this meeting.

2010 also saw a number of new collaborations for the Broadband Forum. During the year the Forum announced its collaboration with the Full Service Access Network (FSAN) to expedite GPON deployments, enhance multi-vendor interoperability and enable better broadband network fiber integration globally. A joint initiative with the HomeGrid Forum was also announced, with the aim of delivering a global compliance and interoperability testing program for products using G.hn technology – ITU-T's unified wired home networking standard.  And another strategic relationship forged was with 3GPP focused on broadband convergence specifications and multi-service architecture developments.

At the same time the membership, delegates from over 200 companies, including many of the world's leading service providers, equipment manufacturers, chip vendors and other key organizations, elected Christophe Alter as the new Chair of the Technical Committee, the body that oversees and coordinates the efforts of the six technical working groups within the Broadband Forum.

Christophe comes from France Telecom Orange, where he is a member of a CTO team dedicated to standards and ecosystems development. He is responsible for France Telecom Orange Group's strategy regarding broadband networks standards. Since he first joined the Broadband Forum in December 2004, Christophe Alter has been a main contributor in the End to End Architecture Working Group and in the Fiber Access Network Working Group and has served as a member of the Board of Directors since 2008.

"I am delighted to be taking over as Technical Chair at such a busy and positive time for the Broadband Forum," said Christophe Alter. "As a member I have watched the Forum grow in stature and authority but also increase enormously the number of technical reports, the range of topics in our scope and the intensity of our relationships with other organizations.  It will be part of my role to manage this growth and to co-ordinate the groups so that they are able to deliver a comprehensive body of standards from over 1500 contributions we receive from members each year."

Christophe succeeds Gavin Young from Cable & Wireless, a founding member of the Forum, who has served as Technical Chair since 1998. Gavin's outstanding contribution to the work of the Forum has been recognized with the conferring of the Forum's highest awards – the Distinguished Fellow Award of the Broadband Forum.

"This has been such a successful year for the Broadband Forum, with progress on strategic initiatives and increasingly active alliances with organizations such as 3GPP, FSAN, the ITU-T, ETSI, ATIS and the HomeGrid Forum, each helping to advance a wide range of work," said Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum. "We have an exciting year ahead as we finalize the IPv6 protocol integration release, continue our work in enabling next generation access, and define the multi-service architecture that will support the evolving needs of broadband convergence.  With so much valuable work in the pipeline, the Broadband Forum looks forward to continuing to make a valuable contribution to the advancement of broadband specifications for many years to come."

For further information please contact Sheila Lashford on +44 (0) 1827 830247 or +44 (0) 7986 514240 or by email to [email protected]

About the Broadband Forum

Broadband Forum, a non-profit industry organization, is focused on engineering smarter and faster broadband connections. Our work defines best practices for global networks, enables service and content delivery, establishes technology migration strategies, engineers critical device & service management tools, and is key to redefining broadband.  Our technical reports and free white papers can be found at www.broadband-forum.org.

SOURCE The Broadband Forum