Broadband Forum Provides a Strong Start to the New Year With a New President and Continued Drive on IPv6, PON, MPLS, Connected Home and Enterprise Services

Boston gathering approves new reports on IPv6 and broadband access

BOSTON, March 16, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- With a record 41 first time attendees boosting total attendance ever higher, the Broadband Forum kicked off a packed agenda providing a launching pad for what promises to be another signature year.

The new Broadband Forum President is Kevin Foster, Head of Access Platform Design at BT and four year member of the Forum Board of Directors. He joins Tom Starr (AT&T), who continues as Chairman, Marcin Drzymala (Telekomunikacja Polska) and Andrew Malis (Verizon Communications) who continue as Vice Presidents, David Sinicrope (Ericsson) who continues as Secretary and Frank Van der Putten (Alcatel-Lucent) who continues as Treasurer.

As the world's leading network operators, vendors and research establishments gathered for the Boston meeting, three new Technical Reports were approved:

• TR-200, using EPON in the context of TR-101
• TR-115   Corrigendum 2 - VDSL functionality test plan
• TR-181 – Issue 2, Amendment 2 – IPv6 Device Data Model for TR-069

The two new Marketing Reports were approved:

• MR-244 (IPv6 tutorial)
• MR-229 Next Generation Wholesale Access

These new reports not only complete the work going into the IPv6 toolkit, but include the first EPON related work and an important guide to the specifications that have application in the wholesale arena.  There was also a very informative keynote presentation on IPv6 from renowned former IETF Internet Area Director, Mark Townsley, Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems. To continue in the theme of looking at how to address the next wave of broadband requirements, a panel of distinguished organizations; 3GPP, ETSI M2M, IETF and Broadband Forum discussed "The Impact on the Network of 50 billion devices."

The annual meeting included an election for three board seats, where Tom Starr (AT&T), Les Brown (Lantiq) and Greg Bathrick (PMC Sierra) were re-elected to the Board of Directors. Other Board members include Peter Adams (ADTRAN), Sultan Dawood (Cisco Systems), Christophe Alter (France Telecom), George Dobrowski (Huawei Technologies), Mauro Tilocca (Telecom Italia) as well as the officers already mentioned.

In recognition of the valuable efforts by some of the world's leading broadband experts, awards for outstanding contributions were presented at the annual meeting, including Leadership Awards for Lynn Merrill of OPASTCO and Michel Borgne of France Telecom. Aleksandra Kozarev of Lantiq was inducted into the Circle of Excellence for her work in Metallic Transmission, while Key Contributor Awards went to Herman Verbueken (Alcatel-Lucent), Christopher Croot (BT), Yves Hertoghs (Cisco Systems), Thomas Haag (DT), Robert Frazier (Ericsson), Alan Kavanagh (Ericsson), John Blackford (PACE) and Lincoln Lavoie (UNH-IOL).

"2011 is already developing into an exciting year for the Forum – full of challenges and opportunities. We see IPv6 as an area of strategic importance, along with PON, Connected Home and Enterprise solutions. We are also looking to reach into new geographical areas, with educational commitments to events in India, Latin America and the Middle East," said Broadband Forum CEO Robin Mersh.

The Broadband Forum will be appearing at conferences and exhibitions around the world in 2011 and in the next two months alone Forum Ambassadors will present at the IP&TV World Forum (London), Convergence India (New Delhi, India), Broadband World Forum MEA (Dubai), Carriers World Asia (Hong Kong), Mobile Backhaul Asia (Thailand), Packet Transport Networks (Spain), FTTx Summit Europe (United Kingdom) and Broadband World Forum Asia (Malaysia).

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