Our Spring Member Meeting saw our biggest attendance in more than 15 years, drawing 158 attendees to Mainz, Germany. We have enjoyed a very productive meeting, and continue to build on the success of 2023, with 16 new work area projects started and two new Open Broadband projects launched since our last meeting. In Mainz, the home to the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press and no stranger to ground-breaking tech innovation, we opened the meeting with discussions on the latest significant breakthrough in tech history. Bringing together technology innovators from across the industry, our Town Hall Innovation Series explored the growing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in broadband networks. The BASe Technical and USP Summits took place in tandem with our member meeting and was highly attended with a host of engaging plenary sessions, roundtables, and video demonstrations. The three events amassed a total of 243 registered attendees across five days. Following the close of our final quarterly meeting of 2023, it is time to reflect on what a great year we have had. The open standards and open broadband projects continue to deliver vital importance to companies, both small and large, as we focus on the latest industry trends, and extract most value to consumers, and transition to services-led broadband. Our Town Hall Innovation Series (THIS) focussed on the topic of security, with six speakers sharing their expertise on the first day of the meeting. Thank you to all that took part and made this an overwhelming success. Alongside the THIS events, we have held 23 industry education and technical events over the past twelve months as well as publishing 18 new technical reports, test plans, and marketing reports, and starting 13 documents nearing completion. Congratulations to our newly appointed Work Area Directors and Evan Sun, Huawei, who will become a new Technical Vice Chair alongside Frank Van Der Putten, Nokia. As strategically planned with our Board of Directors, we look forward to the smooth transition of the leadership team and would like to welcome Ken Pyle as the new Marketing Director. Ken will be working in close collaboration with Craig and the other BBF staff to continue drive forward our communications. Thank you to all of our work area directors, project stream leaders, editors, and contributors for their continuous dedication in building universally adopted open standards and open-source software. Talking with many of the attendees, there was real energy and enthusiasm surrounding the ongoing work and direction of the Broadband Forum... Read more. |