New Vice Chairs Announced as Broadband Forum Strengthens the Service Provider Action Council

The operator council brings together the expertise of representatives from three continents - Asia, Europe and North America

FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Two new vice chairs have been appointed to the Broadband Forum’s Service Provider Action Council (SPAC) as was announced at the industry’s leading organization’s Q4 meeting. Mike Talbert from Verizon and Weiqiang Cheng from China Mobile will help the group continue to provide critical direction on standards development and operator engagement.

Broadband Forum’s SPAC was created to ensure that Service Providers’ voice and requirements stay front and center to all broadband work, accelerating time-to-market and maintaining relevancy and value. SPAC chair Mauro Tilocca (TIM) said: “It has been a pleasure to be able to bring in two people with the level of leadership, expertise and experience Weiqiang and Mike have within their fellow Service Provider community.”

“Their input will be fundamental to the continued evolution of the Service Provider Action Council and help ensure that the work of the Broadband Forum is directly related to the real needs of Service Providers across all corners of the globe. Their global vision of our market, regional knowledge, and direction will only encourage even more Service Providers to join SPAC and drive the demands of our industry into our wider broadband industry work,” Mr Tilocca continued.

Next year, while evolving in response to a rapidly changing sector, the Council will continue to focus on providing the use cases and a common Service Provider voice that influences and drives the Broadband Forum’s Open Standards and Open Software work. Key areas of focus in 2021 will include evolution of the Connectivity and Access to the Business/Residential (CABR), the Connected Home, edge / core evolution, wireless and wireline convergence and the Software Defined Cloud (SDC).

Mike Talbert said: “Broadband Forum’s SPAC plays a vital role in guiding the work of the entire Forum membership so that it continues to drive forward with the development of industry solutions and their effective deployment. I am very much looking forward to being part of that collective voice.”

Weiqiang Cheng said: “The SPAC plays a vital role in supporting Service Providers, helping them to engage with the Broadband Forum and enabling them to play an impactful part to define the Forum’s strategic direction and to influence standards development. The pace of change in the market means the council must evolve to keep up and that is a challenge I am looking forward to working on in 2021.”

Broadband Forum rounds off a successful year with its virtual Q4 meeting, ahead of its final event of the year in partnership with NBN with a virtual BASe event on December 15. Discussing the hottest topics and challenges in broadband today, this is the first time that Broadband Forum will hold a BASe event specifically for the Australasia market.

Last month the Forum completed a successful virtual conference which focused on the important policies, trends, technologies, and opportunities that affect broadband in Europe and beyond in 2020. The new “UFBB BASe” seminar is designed to meet the requirements for more technical discussion, real-life implementations, testing, and strategic technical planning, as well as provide valuable peer-to-peer networking. It is built on the stellar reputation of the old TNO Ultra-Fast Broadband seminar and managed to maintain the high level of thought leadership, speakers, technical acumen, and collaborative and energetic vibe that has always been associated with the event while bringing some new world-class speakers and perspectives to the table.

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About the Broadband Forum

Broadband Forum is the communications industry’s leading open standards development organization focused on accelerating broadband innovation, standards, and ecosystem development. Our members’ passion – delivering on the promise of broadband by enabling smarter and faster broadband networks and a thriving broadband ecosystem.

Broadband Forum is an open, non-profit industry organization composed of the industry’s leading broadband operators, vendors, thought leaders who are shaping the future of broadband, and observers who closely track our progress. Its work to date has been the foundation for broadband’s global proliferation and innovation. For example, the Forum’s flagship TR-069 CPE WAN Management Protocol has nearly 1 billion installations worldwide.

Broadband Forum’s projects span across 5G, Connected Home, Cloud, and Access. Its working groups collaborate to define best practices for global networks, enable new revenue-generating service and content delivery, establish technology migration strategies, and engineer critical device, service & development management tools in the home and business IP networking infrastructure. We develop multi-service broadband packet networking specifications addressing architecture, device and service management, software data models, interoperability and certification in the broadband market.

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For more information about the Broadband Forum, please go to https://www.broadband-forum.org or follow @Broadband_Forum on Twitter. For further information please contact Brian Dolby on [phone] or [e-mail] or Josh Wright on [phone] or [e-mail].