BT, France Telecom, Telecom Italia and Telekomunikacja Polska to give Europe a stronger voice in broadband standards development

12 March - At the annual meeting of the DSL Forum, four of Europe's leading telecommunications network operators were elected to the DSL Forum Board of Directors.

The new members include Kevin Foster, of BT; Christophe Alter, from France Telecom; Mauro Tilocca of Telecom Italia; and Marcin Drzymala from Telekomunikacja Polska. Frank Van der Putten of Alcatel-Lucent, Les Brown of Infineon and Phil Skeba of Intel also were re-elected to the board. These strong industry players will help drive the standards work and direction of the Forum, whose activities now involve a much wider scope than its original DSL mandate - including increasing activity around IPTV, fibre deployments and management of the digital home.

Though BT has had a seat on the Forum's board in the past, this is the first time the other companies have been elected. This strong European presence is representative of the increasing broadband and IPTV leadership coming out of our European members.

In conjunction with the election of the new board members, analyst Point Topic announced the latest IPTV statistics, which revealed global IPTV subscribers topped 10 million in third quarter 2007 - a major milestone and a 27 per cent increase on the previous quarter. Once again Europe is the leading region, having over 6.5 million IPTV subscribers, with France being the country with the most subscribers. Although Western Europe has a strong lead in IPTV deployments, Eastern Europe is beginning to build its IPTV numbers and now has over 297,000 subscribers.