Forum History

The Broadband Forum is a global consortium of nearly 200 leading industry players covering telecommunications, equipment, computing, networking and service provider companies.

Established in 1994, originally as the ADSL Forum and later the DSL Forum, the Broadband Forum continues its drive for a global mass market for broadband, to deliver the benefits of this technology to end users around the world over existing copper telephone wire infrastructures.

In fourteen years, the Broadband Forum has moved through defining the core Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology to delivering maximum effectiveness in broadband deployment and use. In 2005, the Forum launched the BroadbandSuite™, which expanded the scope of our work to cover not only transport but network management and digital home support. The work around remote management to the home (TR-069 family of technical reports) was milestone as it was access agnostic, and is now broadly referenced by other organizations as the de-facto standard for global remote management. In 2008, we made a commitment to developing standards to incorporate alternative access technologies in support of the growing hybrid networks, and began developing work specific to fiber.

Today we have global standardization and common test suites for ADSL, SHDSL and ADSL2/2plus. VDSL2 is gaining ground as well, and should have a performance/functional test suite complete early 2009. These along with bonding will provide a complete portfolio of DSL technologies designed to deliver broadband services for a wide range of situations and applications that will continue the transformation of our day-to-day lives in an on-line world. As a plethora of new devices and services come on line, providers began to integrate fiber into their deployments, increasing their speed, coverage and quality options. The Broadband Forum expanded its work to address fiber architecture, management and digital home support to ensure that service providers can effectively deploy and manage their hybrid networks from a single IP-centric platform.

Best practices for auto-configuration, flow-through provisioning, equipment interoperability and other key facilitators of scaleable, global, mass-market deployment of broadband, are developed through a contribution based system and fast-tracked based on service provider market priorities. A Service Provider Action Council (SPAC) provides an opportunity at each meeting for the providers to meet separately and discuss best practices, issues and opportunities as well as to come together as a collective voice to identify the top initiatives for each year. With this input, the Broadband Forum stays aligned with real world requirements and the Technical Reports (TRs) that are released, have immediate application.

Each member company contributes to the work of the Forum by participating in technical and marketing working groups, sharing their knowledge, experience and expertise to create common, agreed protocols, processes and best practice recommendations for use by the industry and for standards and other related industry bodies.

This work takes place at quarterly, week-long meetings and through the continuous activity of working groups.

Through its marketing activities - an extensive, continuous global public and industry education campaign, the Broadband Forum also ensures a growing international understanding of the benefits of broadband.

In meeting its core objectives, the Broadband Forum continues to establish essential and proven processes for broadband delivery that accelerate the delivery of broadband to the mass market and optimizes the quality of service and experience to the customer.

Technical Reports (TRs) and Marketing Reports (MRs) are available for use throughout the global industry and are available free from our website at http://www.broadband-forum.org/technical/trlist.php.