Liaison and collaborating with The Broadband Forum

Liaison

Since forming in 1994, we have always stood for harmony, cooperation and collaboration in the wider telecommunications industry. The Broadband Forum has championed innovative work across the industry and always looks to avoid duplication of effort.

To drive aligned industry progress, the Broadband Forum communicates its ongoing work and specifications to many different Standards Development Organizations (SDO’s) and industry Fora, and invites input and feedback to help ensure we are all working in agreement. These Liaison Relationships have been for the most part semi-formal, not requiring official agreements and mostly led by volunteers who are members of each organization. These efforts have accelerated standards and driven even closer coordination of mutual technical work.

Many of these informal relationships will remain as they are and will continue to drive standardization progress of the broadband industry.

Collaboration

Other organizations that the Forum collaborates with require more structured agreements due to disparate memberships, different organizational structures and different treatments of intellectual property (IP). These structured agreements come in different forms depending on what the two organizations are looking to accomplish; Cooperation Agreements aid discussions, while Collaboration Agreements facilitate practical collaboration of related working groups.

For more information on liaising with and collaborating with the Broadband Forum please contact Robin Mersh at rmersh@broadband-forum.org