Standardising virtualisation for broadband services
March 6, 2015
This week’s annual Broadband Forum meeting in Shenzhen, China, 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 virtualising 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 virtualised 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.