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
ITREALMS ... everything news digitally!
