Energy efficiency and IPv6 migration among major topics at powerful 2009 opening for Broadband Forum in New Orleans

13 March 2009 – The Broadband Forum’s first meeting for 2009 opened in New Orleans last week, as the organisation launches its 15th landmark year.  Energy was high as a number of new specifications such as broadband energy management work, fibre-related developments, IPv6 migration plans and the beginnings of fixed mobile convergence efforts got underway.

The meeting also incorporated the Forum’s annual Board elections where five Board appointments were made.  Newly elected to the Board was Edward Eckert with Ikanos Communications and re-elected were Tom Starr of AT&T, George Dobrowski of Conexant Systems, Inc., Les Brown of Infineon Technologies and Greg Bathrick of PMC-Sierra. 

The 2009 officers of the Board are George Dobrowski as Chairman and President, Marcin Drzymala with Telekomunikacja Polska as Vice President, Tom Starr as Secretary and Frank Van der Putten with Alcatel-Lucent as Treasurer.

A number of awards were bestowed at the meeting: 

•   In honor of the Forum's fifteenth year celebration, a special new award was developed, called the Distinguished Service Award.  This award honors exceptional individuals who have over time provided a major influence on the direction and success of broadband development. Individuals who receive this award are key individuals who have helped the Forum chart the path forward for broadband technology, and whose vision inspired our industry's growth.  Tom Starr with AT&T, Gavin Young with C&W and Bernard Dugerdil with Freescale Semiconductors were the first inductees, and their continued Forum efforts were celebrated as they are also the final three charter members of the Forum.
•   Heather Kirksey of Alcatel-Lucent received an Outstanding Service Award from the Forum to acknowledge her leadership, contributions and service on the Forum's Board of Directors.  Heather is Director of Product and Technology Strategy at Motive, Inc, which is now part of Alcatel-Lucent. 
•   Tom Anschutz of AT&T and Lior Yeheskiel of ECI Telecom were inducted into the Broadband Forum's Circle of Excellence for their outstanding work and energy in developing the newly approved TR-156 specification.  This key piece of work is representative of more than a year of development and established an important standard for integrating PON into traditional broadband network architecture.
•   2008 Key Contributor Awards were also presented to William Lupton of 2Wire, Michael Hanrahan of Huawei Technologies, Peter Reusens of LAN, David Allen of Nortel Networks and Mauro Tilocca of Telecom Italia.

An important development during the meeting was the approval and release of two Technical Reports (TR):

•   TR-157 ‘Component Objects for CWMP' builds on the established TR-069 and TR-106 management framework to enhance diagnostic capabilities and strengthening the performance monitoring and reporting abilities.  It incorporates new capabilities such as UPnP and DLNA protocol discovery, autonomous transfer and multicast download policy configuration and a variety of other options that ensure enhanced monitoring and periodic reporting procedures.

•   TR-165 ‘Vector of Profiles’ build in greater flexibility in setting DSL profiles by defining a vector of profiles. The DSL configuration parameters are divided into independent, but technically related, sets of parameters. Each parameter set defines a profile. By defining the profiles, which are referenced from a vector of indices, a large number of profiles can be used without having to store huge quantities of profile data. This is a key enabler to DSL Quality Management and is also expected to help providers implement efficient and cost-effective network operation processes such as network creation, service delivery, service assurance and troubleshooting.

Finally, in support of the recent addition of broadband energy efficiency work at the Forum, Chuck Graff, the director for Core Network Technology at Verizon provided the keynote focused on their energy efficiency measures.  Mr Graff spoke about Verizon’s drive to be more energy efficient and how it has demanded vendors demonstrate energy savings of at least 20 percent for any solution supplied to Verizon effective January of this year.  Hearing of Verizon's initiatives stimulated great discussions and helped put a stake in the ground for new EE standards activity at the Forum.

“The last 12 months has been one of remarkable change and progress at the Forum and with more than 350 technical contributions coming into the New Orleans meeting alone, I can see that the foundation is already being laid for a tremendously productive and exciting 2009,” said the Broadband Forum Chairman and President George Dobrowski.

For further information about the Broadband Forum and the technical reports mentioned here, check out www.broadband-forum.org.