The Broadband Forum today announced the conclusion of a special three-day meeting held in Atlanta and subsequent agreement of the Board of Directors, with the purpose of examining common strategies for the future of broadband and IP networking. It also aimed to develop a new operational model and immediate actions that leverage new technology and development approaches to serve the business requirements of the stakeholders in the broadband market.
The outcome of the meeting was a course of action that included the following:
The Forum must embrace the best of both open source and standards development and will immediately instigate new methods for rapid delivery of innovative software and standards for key use cases to the community of manufacturers, service providers and open-source organizations that replace traditional Standards Development Organization (SDO) approaches.
To complement the above action, the Forum will take action to significantly increase its collaboration with key industry groups including developing open initiatives, including both members and non-members, for the benefit of the whole broadband community.
The Forum must emphasize the work and methodology that is bringing the most value to stakeholders, such as new value added services, enabling the broadband smart home; a safe harbor for intellectual property, virtualized business and residential gateways, YANG data models, interop testing for ultra-fast networking and guidance for deployment best practices.
Service providers and equipment manufacturers which support broadband came from around the world to the Atlanta meeting to present their latest thinking on broadband networks to a large audience of Broadband Forum members and invited guests. AT&T, BT, CenturyLink, China Unicom, NTT Labs, Orange, Spark New Zealand, Sky, Telecom Italia and Vodafone, along with key broadband market equipment suppliers Adtran, Calix, Huawei, and Nokia, as well as analyst house Infonetics Research and test organization European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC), gave their visions of the future along with their views on how the Forum should contribute to the future of networking in terms of its work and operations.
An important context for the meeting was the emergence of the Cloud Central Office (CO). Demonstrations and presentations of the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) project
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