The increasingly crucial role global open standards are playing in driving forward the broadband industry is behind the recent growth in new members of the Broadband Forum. This follows a successful 2020 that saw a rise in worldwide participation and industry interest in the group and highlights the open standards organisation’s continued influence and support.

Broadband Forum continues to see a surge of new companies from around the globe. This year Airties, Alethea Communications Technologies, APS Networks, Ciena, General Mobile, Genew Technologies, Google Fiber, H3C, Harmonic Inc, Heights Telecom, Hitron Technologies Inc, KPN, Liberty Global, Merocom Solutions, Microsoft, RDK, Technetix, Tellabs, TP-Link, Travelping GmbH, and Vecima Networks Inc have been welcomed in the first few months of 2021.

Stephen Kelly, connectivity architecture lead at Liberty Global says, “We are delighted to join Broadband Forum as we recognise the importance of sharing our knowledge and collaborating with other members to progress the development of open standards. Being a member of the Broadband Forum ensures we are ideally placed to benefit user experience in the connected home and play a key role in contributing to the broadband user services work area.”

Broadband Forum continues to achieve significant milestones including the launch of its Open Broadband-UDP Speed Test project, the unveiling of the Self-Test Certification Program for User Services Platform (USP) as BBF.369, the inclusion of XG-GPON and XGS-PON in BBF.247, the execution of Beta Trials for BBF.398, and the introduction of Issue2 of the G.Fast Performance Test Plan (TR-380). In addition to those milestones, the Broadband Forum also released a ground-breaking Connected Home report in partnership with Omdia, which was a global survey of more than 100 service providers’ vision and plans for connected home services.

Mengmeng Li at China Mobile says, “All of the Broadband Forum’s work remains important for future industry wide network investment and we are already contributing to valuable work regarding the future of broadband network gateway disaggregation. We look forward to working alongside H3C and other members in making valuable contributions towards industry-defining initiatives in the future, including its Access and Transport Architecture Work Area.”

In addition to this was the successful launch of the Broadband Forum’s ever virtual demo, which spanned Cloud CO, OB-BAA, USP, and closed-loop automation. In light of the global pandemic, the Forum’s educational and thought leadership vBASe series also went virtual, garnering huge interest from across the globe.

Wan XiaoLan at H3C says, “Broadband experience is becoming increasingly more important and Broadband Forum’s work brings together industry players from across the globe. We are happy to be directly involved in this ground-breaking work and help shape the future of broadband network gateway disaggregation.”

Following the coronavirus pandemic, the Members of The Broadband Forum accelerated the momentum leading to more technical reports, test plans and market reports to be published than ever before.

Broadband Forum director of membership development Rhonda Heier says, “The last twelve months has seen the Broadband Forum continue to make substantial strides in the most challenging times. We appreciate the service providers, vendors and influencers across the globe that are collaborating together in the Broadband Forum to drive forward our critical work in 5G, connected home, cloud and the next generation of Access technologies.”

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