" ITREALMS: Broadband Forum gets 13-man Executive Advisory Council

Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Broadband Forum gets 13-man Executive Advisory Council

An international non-profit industry organization with focus on engineering smarter and faster broadband networks, the Broadband Forum, has created a 13-man Executive Advisory Council (EAC) made up of industry leaders to help ensure that the Forum delivers direction to the broadband industry in a fast-changing environment, reports ITRealms.

The chief executive officer, Broadband Forum, Mr. Robin Mersh said the creation of the Advisory Council originated in discussions at the Forum’s Special Meeting, held in Atlanta last year, which saw the development of a new operational model and immediate actions to leverage new technology and approaches to serve the business requirements of the stakeholders in the broadband market.

The idea of the Advisory Council, Mersh said, came from the recent changes in the industry with a paradigm shift both in terms of technology and methodology, stressing that this raises the question of what sort of deliverables are needed and, in any organization, it is always important to ensure the question of business value is central to the forum’s activity.

“This is what our new Advisory Council aims to do. Now more than ever, any work the Forum undertakes needs to have a strong business case and the expertise and experience of our new panel will help ensure this,” the CEO said.

ITRealms gathered from Mersh that the initial list of executives on the Broadband Forum’s new Advisory Council includes Robert Balsamo, VP Advanced Technology at Calix; Didier Boivin, Marketing Vice President, Corporate Board Member, at Metanoia Communications; Don Clarke, Principal Architect, Network Technologies, at CableLabs; Jim Crammond, Senior Director, Connected Home Division, at Intel; Michael Dargue, Principal Consultant at Cartesian; David Eckard, Fixed Networks CTO at Nokia and Heather Kirksey, Director of the OPNFV.

Others are Guru Paralkar, Executive Director of ON.Lab and CORD Project board member; Robert Qi, Chief Strategy Officer, Network Solutions, at Huawei; Kevin Schneider, CTO at ADTRAN; Xiongyan Tang, Chief Technologist of China Unicom; Bill Walker, Director of Network Architecture – SDN, NFV, and Cloud at CenturyLink; and Gavin Young, Head of Fixed Access at Vodafone

“I am looking forward to discussing the many strategic questions facing the industry with this illustrious group. This team has a lot of knowledge and experience and we will continue to add to it in the near future,” he said.

ITRealms  further gathered that following its meeting in Atlanta and subsequent evolution, the Broadband Forum is putting an increasing focus on software and working with open source projects.

This, the forum noted, is helping to deliver on the Broadband Forum’s Broadband 20/20 vision, which focuses on specific new broadband home and business opportunities that leverage Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), the Internet of Things (IoT) and ultra-fast technologies, pointing out that initial discussions with the Advisory Council will address this new direction as a priority.


Chuks Egbune/GEE 
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