European Telecom Leaders Keynote at Broadband Forum Meeting

FREMONT, Calif., Dec. 3, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Broadband Forum (BBF) was privileged to start its fourth quarter 2013 meeting in Rome, Italy with keynotes from Constantijn van Oranje, Head of Cabinet VP Neelie Kroes of the European Commission, and Luigi Gambardella, Chairman of the Board at ETNO (European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association).  Bringing authoritative regulatory and Operator advocacy perspectives to the broadband discussion, they both agreed there was a need for more synergy between technology and regulation, along with the need for greater investment in European networks.

Both speakers discussed how technology can help inform regulation. Since the pace of technological change is challenging, the Broadband Forum, as a neutral player, was encouraged to continue providing input to help ensure regulation does not hinder technology innovation unnecessarily and that Operators have the tools they need to expedite strategic rollouts of broadband and to deepen the reach into underserved areas.

BBF celebrates excellence
Key technology experts from the Broadband Forum's member organizations attended the quarterly meeting, representing many of the world's leading Telco and Cable service providers, equipment and chip manufacturers and other key organizations. The meeting provided the perfect platform to recognize the efforts of two of these outstanding individuals, David Sinicrope from Ericsson and David Thorne from BT, who were each awarded the Distinguished Fellow award, the top BBF honor, given only to individuals who have provided a major influence on the direction and success of broadband development, and whose vision continues to inspire our industry's growth.  Michael Langhammer from Deutsche Telekom was inducted into the Circle of Excellence, recognizing his exceptional contributions in the areas of DSL interoperability, performance testing and VDSL2 Vectoring advancement.

"Our members work extremely hard to deliver the specifications that offer Operators the tools and techniques they need each year to expedite rollouts and stimulate broadband innovation," said Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum. "Through their expertise and efforts, the Forum is delivering on our commitment to broadband excellence; overcoming obstacles and challenges along the way, and opening the door to industry profitability."

Progress made for strategic projects

Three key projects made significant progress:
FTTdp/G.fast With an aggressive project plan in place, the BBF is tackling the overall architecture, transmission technology for fiber and copper access, and management specifications that will make up the Fiber-to-the-Distribution Point (FTTdp/G.fast) Release scheduled for next year.  This work spans four working groups in the BBF and is primarily focused on empowering Operators with a fast ramp up of this promising access platform with interoperability established from day one. 

Small Cell Backhaul Work is completing on a Small Cells Release scheduled for first quarter that extends the TR-221 architecture to offer MPLS enhancements to better address the fast paced evolution of the Small Cell market, focused on deployment topology and management.

Virtualization  In this area of innovation, the BBF has now completed the study document on Cloud Intelligent Broadband Networks (CIBN) and commenced new work incorporating these requirements into the TR-144 architecture. The technical analysis of Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) applicability to broadband services kicked off at this meeting, as well as work on BNG Network Virtualization, so this will be a very hot topic of 2014.

With other strategic projects around FMC, Broadband Performance Metrics and TR-069 Interoperability Testing, the BBF funnel of new work is packed and the BBF Releases that are scheduled for 2014 will chart the course for the next generation of network evolution.

For more information about the Broadband Forum, please go to http://www.broadband-forum.org or follow @Broadband_Forum on Twitter. For further information please contact Brian Dolby on +44 (0) 7899 914168 or Dana Corson on +44 (0) 1636 812152 or send an email to [email protected]  or [email protected].

About the Broadband Forum
Broadband Forum, a non-profit industry organization, is focused on engineering smarter and faster broadband networks. 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 free technical reports and white papers can be found at www.broadband-forum.org. Twitter @Broadband_Forum.

To see this press release, please visit:
http://www.broadband-forum.org/news/download/pressreleeases/2013/BBF_4Q13.pdf

SOURCE The Broadband Forum