Broadband 20/20: a new world of communications

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Broadband Forum's vision to enable important new service provider revenue streams and transform personal and business communications

Munich, Germany - The Broadband Forum announced its new Broadband 20/20 vision. The vision is to enable new opportunities for profitable revenue growth by leveraging new technologies in the home, small business and multi-user infrastructure of the broadband network. The innovative use of NFV, SDN, ultra-fast access, IoT (Internet of Things) and, when formally defined, 5G, enables the delivery of exciting ultra-fast broadband services, with distributed compute and storage to anywhere and any device in the home and business locations.

It enables new markets and business models for providers worldwide to deliver these services and applications, transforming the way people communicate, purchase and consume all manner of informational and entertainment content. Launching the Forum's Broadband 20/20 today, CEO Robin Mersh unveiled the Forum's strategy to enable a new world of broadband, featuring seamless migration to ultra-fast, agile connectivity, and exciting new roles for service providers unparalleled in the industry.

The top five areas of innovation identified and enabled by Broadband 20/20 are ultra-fast infrastructure, intelligent home/small business, seamless converged wireline and wireless networks, performance-assured on-demand IP broadband services and a personalized network experience.

Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum

"Of course, all service providers are very focused on profitable revenue-generating services but this is the first time this or any forum has come together as a community to take a holistic approach to new technologies and have them deliver real value," said Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum. "We are very proud of what the Forum has already achieved in its 24-year history in making broadband what it is today, but now we have embarked on a new challenge, a new opportunity and in fact the chance to create a whole new world of communications."

The Broadband Forum has helped shape a world in which now more than 700 million customers enjoy broadband. Now, in order to realize the promise of Broadband 20/20, the Forum has undergone a major restructure into eight work areas with a new culture of rapid technical development so as to incrementally deliver technical specifications, architecture, management, software data models, APIs, interoperability tests, etc., around which the industry can evolve.

"NFV and SDN has made the industry think about how fast we need to develop our networks in this era of enormous bandwidth demand and it has made it look across the entire eco-system to converge and develop technologies that will create revenue and services quickly and efficiently. The Forum has a key and unique role to play in making it happen," added Mersh.

The Forum's Broadband 20/20 vision is for ultra-fast technologies and software to be delivering significant new levels of performance and assurance, and rapid deployment. For the foreseeable future, the broadband infrastructure will act as a hybrid ecosystem; handling both current static and new programmable, virtualized networking and computing as the market moves forward.

The Forum, which announced the appointment of Software Architect William Lupton at the beginning of the year, has been working to deliver on many key work areas in the Broadband 20/20 vision, but much remains to be achieved, particularly in the area of data models and APIs.

"The pace of change in telecommunications never slackens - it always increases - and this new focus for the Forum will support the industry in not only matching that pace but to do it by creating important new revenue streams at the same time," said Mersh.

About the Broadband Forum
The Broadband Forum is the industry's defining body for LAN/WAN architecture design, implementation, management and certification testing for technologies, both existing and emerging, in the Broadband market. Our work encompasses best practices for global networks, enables new revenue-generating service and content delivery, establishes technology migration strategies, engineers' critical device, service & development management tools, in the home and business IP networking infrastructure. Broadband expertise is sourced from more than 150 manufacturers and service provider companies, the Forum has published over 200 globally adopted standards over the last 24 years. Activity levels driven by the emergence of ultra-fast connectivity, IoT, NFV and SDN and the new Broadband 20/20 initiative have seen contribution levels rise to more than 1400 in the last 12 months.