LF Broadband, a collaborative initiative focused on advancing innovation in open-source broadband access, has announced a new partnership with Broadband Forum, a global standards development organization helping operators, application providers, and vendors deliver better, services-led broadband. This partnership aims to bridge the gap between industry standards and open-source technologies, fostering greater cooperation to accelerate innovation and deployment of broadband networks.

At a high level, the partnership will focus on coordinating industry positioning to accelerate development and adoption of modular, intelligent, efficient, disaggregated, highly automated, multi-vendor broadband networks and solutions with open interfaces. Specific areas of collaboration will include events, marketing, standards and specifications development, software code contributions, and testing of solutions.

“The missions of LF Broadband and Broadband Forum are complementary, so it is logical for the two organizations to collaborate on ways for open source technologies and industry standards to work together to drive innovation in broadband network technologies,” said Linux Foundation General Manager of Networking and Orchestration Arpit Joshipura. “We are excited about the potential that this collaboration will unlock for the broadband community.”

“We are delighted to partner with LF Broadband at a time when open source software and open standards continue to play critical roles,” said Craig Thomas, CEO at Broadband Forum. “This collaboration provides the perfect opportunity for decision-makers from both organizations to come together and build future broadband networks that have intelligence, interoperability, and automation built-in.”

“This partnership strengthens and further accelerates the fruitful collaboration work that has already begun, harnessing the synergies of proven mature open source implementations and leading industry standards,” said Manuel Paul, Co-Chair, Linux Foundation Broadband and President, Broadband Forum.

LF Broadband supports a collection of projects that are transforming broadband networks and the Passive Optical Network (PON) industry, including the SEBA reference design for building open broadband networks, and the VOLTHA open source project for virtualizing multi-vendor PON systems. Broadband Forum provides an accessible, efficient, and effective community where all broadband stakeholders can collaborate on, develop, and promote open standards and open software.