– USA, CA / HUNGARY, Budapest – Broadband Forum today announced the newly elected and re-elected members of its Board of Directors, the re-election of its Technical Chair and the appointment of its Marketing Chair.
Chosen for a two-year tenure, experts from a variety of leading operators and product developers have joined the twelve-member Board including Francisco de Carvalho of BT, Bernd Hesse of Calix, John Blackford of CommScope, David Sinicrope of Ericsson, Frank Van der Putten of Nokia, and Mauro Tilocca of TIM.
Kevin Foster, of BT, is retiring from his role as Chairman of Broadband Forum, a role that he has held since 2012. John Blackford, project lead on the Forum’s Open Broadband – USP Agent (OB-USP-Agent) implementation and Co-director of the BUS Work Area, has been appointed as Chairman. Blackford is involved in some of Broadband Forum’s most innovative work as it prepares fixed networks for the era of 5G and the Connected Home.
“As we enter a new era of connectivity, the critically important work within Broadband Forum is helping to shape how broadband evolves,” said Blackford. “I am honored to accept the role of Broadband Forum Chairman and look forward to working with our operator and vendor members and partners to ensure that fixed networks can take full advantage of the myriad of new technologies available in a scalable and cost-effective way through the development of open standards.”
Other members of the Board of Directors include CEO Robin Mersh, Tom Starr of AT&T, Aleksandra Kozarev of Intel, Manuel Paul of Deutsche Telekom, Helge Tiainen of InCoax and Ning Zong of Huawei Technologies.
Bernd Hesse was additionally appointed as Marketing Chair. Hesse has been the driving force behind the highly successful Broadband Acceleration Seminar (BASe) initiative at the Forum since 2017. In his capacity as Marketing Chair, he will focus on positioning the work of the Forum in the rapidly changing environment of 5G, high capacity PON, the multi-service Connected Home, SDN and NFV.
At the Q1 meeting, held in Budapest, Hungary, Lincoln Lavoie of the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL) was also re-elected as Technical Chair. Lavoie has participated in many of the Broadband Forum’s initiatives since 2003, such as projects on testing and interoperability of various broadband technologies, including DSL, Gfast, TR-069, GPON, and NFV/SDN.
“With the rise of open source communities, new disruptive technologies and the rapid pace at which the broadband industry is evolving, building strong partnerships with other organizations is a key part of Broadband Forum’s strategy,” said Robin Mersh, CEO of Broadband Forum. “I am delighted that some world-class leaders have been elected, at what is an exciting and pivotal time for the Forum.”
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.
For more information: https://www.broadband-forum.org
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