Broadband Forum Completes Transformation to ‘Open’ Organization, Connecting the Worlds of Open Standards and Open Source

First open meeting another milestone in the evolution of the broadband industry’s leading organization

PANAMA CITY, Panama--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Broadband Forum today announced it has become an ‘open’ organization – making all of its work visible to the industry.

The by-law amendment was passed on 14 October and the transition was confirmed at its Q4 meeting in Panama City, Panama. The move reflects Broadband Forum’s leadership in ushering in an industry-wide evolution to greater agility and transparency that aims to strike the right balance between open source and standards, further opening the whole broadband ecosystem by continuing to drive interoperability and an open market.

“Our move to an open organization is very much like the key piece of a giant jigsaw puzzle that we have been working on for a number of years, so it is fulfilling to step back and look at the significant transformation that we’ve achieved to date,” said Robin Mersh, CEO of Broadband Forum. “That said, our evolution continues in step with the transformations taking place across the entire broadband industry. Broadband Forum is very much taking a leading role here; we are one of the first to make the shift, becoming much more like our sister organizations such as the IETF, the IEEE and the ITU. We would encourage anyone who is interested in helping open the whole broadband ecosystem to come and see the work we do in promoting both open source and standards.”

Julie Kunstler, Principal Analyst at Ovum, predicts that Broadband Forum’s move to being open will be welcomed by players across the ecosystem of the broadband industry.

“Broadband Forum’s shift to a more ‘open’ organization is a positive one that aligns with the industry trends,” she said. “The move should be welcomed by service providers and vendors as it promotes agility and interoperability, keeping pace with the rapid changes across the communications and media industries.”

Broadband Forum’s transformation began at an Atlanta strategy workshop in 2016 when it committed to embracing the best of open source and standards development. It instigated new agile methods for rapid delivery of innovative software and standards to deliver significantly faster time-to-market and enhanced Dev/Ops approach.

The Forum’s efforts to modify traditional standards development by marrying the work with software development, with a particular focus on increasing programmability and agility, resulted in the rapid launch of a number of projects, including YANG modelling, Cloud Central Office (CloudCO), data modeling and, ultimately, its Open Broadband projects – Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA), USP Agent (OB-USP-AGENT) and Multi Access Point (OB-MAP).

Broadband Forum’s work has continued to progress rapidly, with initiatives being undertaken across key areas including 5G, the Connected Home, Open Broadband and next-generation access. Some of these achievements were showcased at Broadband World Forum 2019, where demonstrations of CloudCO (see video here), Connected Home (see video of services as a USP extension demo here and services as USP software module using containers here), and Broadband QED (see video here) initiatives took place, showing how Broadband Forum now works to quickly move concepts to practical implementations.

The development of Broadband Forum’s Open Broadband Labs (OB-Labs) across the world has also helped accelerate global migration to cloud-based broadband infrastructure, enabled open source collaboration and ensured interoperability. Broadband Forum is building on this initiative by launching two more OB-Labs. University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) and LAN (which is specifically focused on the Forum BBF.247 PON Certification) have now joined OB-Labs in Asia and Europe (EANTC), providing an industry sandbox to accelerate multi-vendor innovation and incubation in areas like 5G, network slicing, and wireless-wireline convergence worldwide.

For more information about Broadband Forum and its latest initiatives, please see https://www.broadband-forum.org/. If you are interested in becoming a member of Broadband Forum, find out more at: https://www.broadband-forum.org/join-us.

About the Broadband Forum

Broadband Forum is the communications industry’s leading open standards development organization focused on accelerating broadband innovation, standards, and ecosystem development. Our members’ passion – delivering on the promise of broadband by enabling smarter and faster broadband networks and a thriving broadband ecosystem.

Broadband Forum is an open, non-profit industry organization composed of the industry’s leading broadband operators, vendors, thought leaders who are shaping the future of broadband, and observers who closely track our progress. Its work to date has been the foundation for broadband’s global proliferation and innovation. For example, the Forum’s flagship TR-069 CPE WAN Management Protocol has nearly 1 billion installations worldwide.

Broadband Forum’s projects span across 5G, Connected Home, Cloud, and Access. Its working groups collaborate to define best practices for global networks, enable new revenue-generating service and content delivery, establish technology migration strategies, and engineer critical device, service & development management tools in the home and business IP networking infrastructure. We develop multi-service broadband packet networking specifications addressing architecture, device and service management, software data models, interoperability and certification in the broadband market.

Our free technical reports and white papers can be found at https://www.broadband-forum.org/.

Follow us on Twitter @Broadband_Forum and LinkedIn.

For more information about the Broadband Forum, please go to https://www.broadband-forum.org or follow @Broadband_Forum on Twitter. For further information please contact Brian Dolby on [phone] or [e-mail] or Jayne Brooks on [phone] or [e-mail].