Broadband Forum adds Broadcom, DT and Huawei execs to board

The Broadband Forum on Tuesday during their quarterly meeting appointed executives from three companies--including Broadcom, Deutsche Telekom (DTE.DE), and Huawei--to their board of directors.

Joining the board are Broadcom's Technical Director, Lowell D. Lamb, Deutsche Telekom's International Standardization Expert, Manuel Paul, and Huawei's Director of Access Standards, Les Brown.

In addition to the new board members, the forum appointed Sultan Dawood of Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) as the Marketing Chair, while Christophe Alter of France Telecom-Orange won re-election as Technical Chair. Tom Starr of AT&T (NYSE: T) was also re-elected to the Board.

It also began work on six key initiatives relating to broadband networks: Fiber to the Distribution Point (FTTdp), Cloud impacts on Broadband Networks, Intelligent Optical Distribution Networks (iODN), Packet & Optical integration, G.vector Testing and M2M Remote Management via TR-069.

During the meeting, the forum released Technical Report 255 (TR-255), a test plan designed to verify interoperability between GPON-based Optical Line Terminals (OLTs) and BBF.247 certified Optical Network Units (ONUs). TR-255 outlines a number of test cases defined in both Broadband Forum TR-156 and the ITU-T G.988 standard.

All members of the broadband ecosystem, including equipment providers, service providers, silicon vendors, and software providers, can use this test plan to complete both internal and/or private testing of their products.

Last month, the BBF extended its GPON Optical Network Unit (ONU) Certification Program to address vendor interoperability and upcoming generations of PON, including XG-PON, otherwise known as 10G PON.

To address ONU conformance testing, the forum's BroadbandSuite 5.0, known as BBF.247, will focus on two key areas. They will address specific ONU profiles in addition to developing test plans related to a proposed Broadband Forum G-PON ONU/OLT test suite, which establishes Optical Line Terminal (OLT) network interoperability with ONUs that have been BBF.247 certified.

For more:
- see the release

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